The begging letter.

I was born in Barrow-in-Furness on the Twentieth of March 1970 in the

Roosecoat hospital, the son of Brian, a plumber in the local shipyard and
Elizabeth, a housewife.

I had a happy childhood and with regard to my mum and dad, I have no
complaints. I was their second child. I have a sister older than me by six
years. The four of us lived in a terraced house, in housing built for the
shipyard workers, until I was eleven.

My parents wanted a garden after years of nothing but a backyard and

back streets and eventually we moved to a semi-detached house on the
outskirts of the town. “It lifts the spirits, a garden,” my dad used to say,
looking out at it. At that point he would have been twenty years into his
thirty-three year working life in the Shipyard, in his early fifties.
There had never been much money around, and it was even scarcer now,
with the new mortgage, my sister in her second year of A-levels, me
starting senior school and needing a new uniform. In order to help out
with the family finances my mum took up various jobs, cleaning,
working as a dinner lady and finally taking on a long stint as a Home-
Help, a job she kept up until she retired. She was the oldest of nine
children and hadn’t really had a childhood herself, helping her own
mother to look after them all. Looking after people was what she knew.

.My dad wasn’t demonstrative, but he was involved with us and cared for
us in lots of ways that other dads didn’t, especially when it came to us
getting an education. What he wanted more than anything was for us not
to have the kind of life he had had, a life of manual work, the shop floor,
or clerking. He wanted something better for his kids. Though he couldn’t
identify exactly what that better thing was, the way to get there, to be in
a position at least where you had some choices, was education. My dad
was naturally intelligent, naturally curious, keen on words and what they
could do, but no-one had encouraged him when he was a boy and
because of that he pushed us to do well in school. As a child and as a
teenager I was a daydreamer and so his success was limited, there was
disappointment and there were battles.

Like most bright teenagers from small towns, by the age of sixteen all I
wanted to do was to escape. Even so, I failed all my O-Levels and had to
take them again the next year under the threat of a job in the Shipyard.
The second time I got through enough to go on to take A levels and
eventually went to University in Leeds to study English and Philosophy.
 At Nineteen, going off to University a year later than everyone else,
having smoked a bit of dope and crashed on friend’s floors after gigs in
Manchester and Birmingham, grown my hair and built up a collection of
the right records, I thought I’d seen it all, and it was a shock to me to
suddenly be among that many intelligent and articulate young people
from a wide variety of backgrounds. I was conscious of my own
background, my class, my accent, how narrow, really, my experience of
life had been and how unsophisticated I was, in a way that I hadn’t been
before. I was loud and opinionated back home, especially when I was
drunk, and while I could get away with it in the gang of small town
punks that I gravitated toward, at University it was a different situation.
There I was run-of-the-mill. Provincial.

Like a lot of outwardly confident people I had a fragile ego and it was
badly bruised. My sense of who I was and how the world worked became
more tentative. I was already in the habit of drinking and I wasted my
time, talking, reading everything but the books that I was supposed to be
looking into, listening to music, getting stoned, hanging out with all the
other guys too smart to do any work, the guys in bands, the ones who
were going to write or make films, whose unconventional ideas were
going to blow everyone away, but who somehow never quite got round
to finishing anything, who were always about to, or in the middle of, or
abandoning one brilliant project for another even more certain to win
them the acclaim they insisted they didn’t really desire.

I was waiting for things to happen to me, waiting for The Big Thing, for
my indeterminate but evident genius to be recognized, for my prized
outsider status to be embraced, my parents scrimping and saving,
working nights and overtime to keep me there, the prodigal, wasteful son
they had their hopes invested in.

Then, toward the end of my degree, at the age of twenty-two, I fell in

love.

I have been in love twice in my life. The first time it lasted for five years
and ended badly, as these things seem to.

She was called Rachael. She was beautiful, highly-intelligent, witty,

artistic, middle-class, black and lost, and she seemed to me, at the age of
twenty-one, to be everything I could possibly want. We fell in love
immediately. For the eight months or so until University ended, while
we were still cushioned by student life, it was rapturous.

Love can make you ridiculous, especially if you have a tendency toward
grandiosity. I pitied people who weren't us. I felt that no-one had ever
overflowed with exalted feeling as passionately as we did. That we were
among history's elect, in the pantheon of great lovers. Love lifted me up
out of the mundane, and more than ever the future felt that it was mine
for the taking, that some kind of glory was on the horizon.

After we left University everything went wrong and we spent the next
three years slowly dragging each other down. We were in a spiral of self-
doubt and self-destruction. I drank almost constantly, we rowed
furiously, we blamed each other for being trapped, for our own lack of
courage, our own hatred of the world, of “real-life” and our fear of what
it would do to us, how it wanted our souls in exchange for a few
miserable, material things. My self was all I had. It was the thing I'd
invested all my energy and all my hope in. I couldn't stand to just give it
away, see it smashed up. That was like suicide.

But what we did was like suicide, anyway. We took low-pay, low-skill
jobs, that asked nothing of us in terms of attitude or commitment, that
didn't require us to give up too much of ourselves. Even so, my ability to
stay in a job was poor. I started in DSS offices, got sacked for being late
too frequently, for being hung-over and reeking of beer, for
spending too long in the smoking room, or the toilets, reading the
book that never left my back pocket.
I took temporary work in a bank stuffing envelopes, got sacked again,
even more quickly and for the same
reasons, couldn't face another office and slowly slipped down the ladder
into factory and warehouse jobs, not even the skilled work my dad
had managed. We hung onto the student life long past the point that
most people had wised-up, going out every night, forming a clique with
all the others who refused to participate. Drugs, books, theories, music,
these were the only things I cared about, the only things that seemed
meaningful, and the more extreme, the more unpalatable or offensive,
the more anti the way things were, the better.

We slid into an edgy, grey world of eternal hangovers and come downs,
hours of tedious menial work, horrendous fights, wild fantasizing.

The last year we lived together she was systematically unfaithful to me

and I, having nowhere else to go, having no resources, nothing but debts,
lived with her in a stupor of depression and denial before I cracked, one
cold day in February and left for good.

Had I been stronger or less easily angered, less defensive, more certain of
what I wanted things might have been different. But we were
drowning, clawing at each other, dragging each other under. During the
last year of our lives together I used to lie drunk on the floor of our living
room, in the tiny back-to-back we shared behind the Royal Park pub in
Leeds, lighting cigarettes from the one functioning grill on the gas fire,
waiting for her to come home, knowing deep-down that she wouldn't be.
I used to wish that she would die. I wished for it truly and
wholeheartedly. I prayed that she would be killed in a car accident, any
way that would relieve me of the responsibility of leaving her.
I dreamed that some impersonal force, the hand of God, would save me
from her, in the same way I needed it to save me from myself.

I was at a dead end. There was always my parents house to return to but I
was such a mess, physically and emotionally that I was ashamed to go
back there. I hadn't been home in three years and couldn't stand the idea
that they would see just what their hopes had come to. Two days after I
left her, on February the twentieth 1996 I ended up in Castleford.

I spent two weeks sleeping in the spare room of a man I worked with,
who was good enough to take me in, then another five months as a lodger
in his brother's house.
The first man was called Andrew Hanson. His brother was, of course,
Robert Hanson.

After two nights crashing my friend Nick’s sofa, I got on a National

Express coach down at Leeds bus station and got off a few hours later in
Castleford.

Andy met me there, roll up in his mouth, sipping from a can of Tenants,
his thick, grey hair plastered to his head with the rain. He had another
three cans hidden in his jacket pockets. He immediately offered me one
and I opened it and drank it down quickly. I needed it. I was starting out
on my new life.

Andy had been my boss for two years, from March 1993 to December
1995. While most of the people I had graduated with had slowly drifted
off into respectable positions, I had ended up working in the warehouse
of a jewelry factory in Leeds. There were just the two of us in there and
we were responsible for offloading the supplies from the HGVs that
pulled into the loading bay every day, stacking and storing them and
taking them across to the main factory as required, through a complicated
series of coded security doors and checks designed to make sure that no
one could steal anything.

The warehouse was big and draughty, and the unsealed concrete floor
meant that the air was permanently filled with concrete dust, something
which played havoc with my colds in Winter and my hay fever in
Summer. I had a cold more or less permanently during those years. The
pay was poor, there were no benefits, no sick pay, no job security at all.
The only thing that redeemed it were the long stretches of inactivity in
which I could read, our lunchtime visits to the pub and our secret,
afternoon drinking sessions in the upstairs part of the warehouse where
we squatted amongst cardboard boxes filled with files and drank bottles
of extra-strength cider, ears always on the alert for the main door at the
other end of the warehouse slamming closed behind a manager come to
make sure we weren't slacking off.

I went home drunk every day for two years, all my meager wage spent in
a pub on the industrial estate, two minutes from the place I earned it.

Despite the nearly twenty years difference in our ages, Andy and I got
along well, we identified with each other immediately. Even if he was
suspicious of students, my long hair and scruffy clothes reminded him of
how he'd been at my age. He was an older version of the type I had
always gravitated toward. Neither of us wanted any responsibility,
neither of us wanted to be the boss. Andy had been one for a while at a
mattress-recycling factory and then left the job for this one, taking a
big pay cut on the way, finding the disciplining and sacking people, the
middle-management attitude he was supposed to display and the values
of his work colleagues alien to him.

I respected him for that. And even if I had the advantage of more formal
education than he did, what difference did that make? I was clearly cut
from the same cloth, filled with animosity, averse on a deep level to
everything in the world of work, its triviality, its responsibility, the
politics, the personas.
It was work itself I objected to, not the type of work. The obligation to
work had always hung over me like a prison sentence. There was no job I
wanted to do, no work that could ever have gratified me.
On cold winter mornings the two of us would sit close to the gas heater
smoking roll ups, swilling down mugs of Nescafe, trying to fight off our
hangovers until lunchtime arrived. We were always immersed in a book,
hoping that the first lorry wouldn't turn up just yet. Give me ten more
minutes of this, just let me finish this chapter, it's raining, sleeting out
there.
At those moments I almost felt as though I was at home, the two of us in
a little bubble, united in rejection of it all. It was almost cozy, and
somehow it allowed me to continue my education, perhaps even
compensate for all the time I wasted during the years I was supposed to
be studying. I read everything, history, politics, philosophy.
I was on fire with reading in those years, though how much of it all I
really understood is a good question. It all seemed essential to me. It was
vital to know as much as possible. A survival strategy, good armour.

We were going nowhere, but then, where was there to go? He was stuck
in the middle of his life, nostalgic, bitter about how his generation had
wasted all that they'd been given, all the education and idealism that had
ended up in money grubbing and self interest, I was stalled at the start of
mine, couldn't imagine any way of getting it off the ground alone.

We did what anyone would do in that situation, we drank. We drank

first and foremost because it got rid of our hangovers and restored us to
the state of well-being non-drinkers wake up to. That first pint felt like a
homecoming, a restoration. It made our minds sharper, freed up our
tongues for the scorn and criticism we wanted to heap upon the world,
sitting up there in our little room among the boxes. It felt good to get
drunk in work, not just drunk but pissed, and then go straight back to the
pub for a post-work pint or two to keep on putting the world to rights,
indulging in fantasies about how in a year or so we would escape, how all
this drinking was temporary, the prelude, the necessary preparation
somehow for the triumphs, for the daring to come.
I was going to form a band. Though I couldn't play any instruments or
sing I had friends who were skilled musicians and I imagined hooking up
with them, bending them to my will, producing something epochal.
Perhaps I would go into films, making subversive underground shorts
that would excoriate the film-making world with such brilliance that
although they would be shocked and chastened they wouldn't be able to
deny me.
I wanted the only thing that could satisfy my ego, my indolence, my
desire, to be an enfant terrible. Andy for his part would write a lucrative
series of detective novels or pulp horror of the kind he bought for
twenty-pence a go from second-hand shops and raced through in the
grim, enclosed hours in the Warehouse, tossing them aside disdainfully at
the end with a snort, certain that he could do better.

We would show them that they had underestimated us. That we weren't
where they were, with the money, the cars, the weekend breaks, the
dinner parties, not because we weren't smart enough but because we
spurned those things, because we had our sights set on something higher.
It was just a question of deciding when and where exactly to start, of
taking the decisive step. It was always there, the possibility of something
greater, sweetening the present, keeping us trapped in our lives, a
consolation and a cage. And when we were drunk we made fervent
promises to ourselves that we would start tomorrow, no more talk, the
moment is here, this is how I'll begin, this is how everything will
change. And then the next day, too hungover to do anything but drink to
take the edge of it we would grow passionate and certain again, our eyes
shining, supporting each other's flights of fantasy, always just on the edge
of success.

Straight away we hit the pub across the road from the bus station, got in
out of the drizzle into somewhere warm. The drinks were on Andy.
Our tactic was to buy a pint, then fill up our empty glasses from the cans
of Super-strength that were in his pockets.
He was drunk already, having trouble getting the nub of his roll-up lit
without burning his nose, and I was jittery for a number of reasons.
I'd never been to Castleford before. It had a reputation as a hard man's
town and I looked a lot like a student. Long hair, army trousers, a baggy
black cardigan. Going into the pub I'd felt the looks, the disapproval. This
wasn't a student town, this was how it was back home, perhaps worse. I
decided to cut all my hair off. Not just because it marked me out, but as a
way of starting anew, of making sure that I wasn’t going back there, back
to her. I would spend some time here with Andy, crashing in his box
room until I got myself sorted out.
I told myself this as Andy filled my empty glass with nine point five
percent lager under the table, then passed it up to me. The head started
half way down the pint, as stiff and peaked as egg whites. How I
imagined I was ever going to get things straightened out with Andy
around I have no idea. I knew that I couldn't, but I needed to pretend to
myself that something else, something more than years, perhaps even a
lifetime's worth of drunken limbo was what I was destined for.

I scooped out a few fingerfuls of foam and dropped it onto the floor,
ground it into the carpet with my boot. Looked around to check none of
the bar staff had seen me.
I was going to go to Andy's house for the first time, to meet his wife, his
kids, to be a lodger in another person's home, with their family. I'd
always lived with other people of course, all through University and then
afterward with Rachael but this situation would be something new to me
and the idea of seeing Andy in a different context, in another role,
immersed in a life in which I knew he was unhappy was something I
didn't feel prepared for.

All it needed to get me over my uncertainty was another can of beer on

my empty stomach, another few roll ups, then everything was be fine,
anything seemed possible. I would keep a low profile, try to limit my
drinking, be as polite and helpful, as discreet as possible.

Andy went to make a phone call, to explain that we'd get some chips on
the way home, that we would be back late, that his wife shouldn't make
dinner for us, and came back with a sour expression on his face.
"She's pissed off we're not going straight back there," he said
and shrugged, then went back to his pint, his mouth set grimly. He
swallowed it down in measured gulps, like medicine.
No doubt I did the same.

We soon fell to talking, going over the same set of concerns, how fucked-
up everything was, how wrong they all were, how we would show them.
When nine o'clock rolled around, with Andy reluctant to push his luck
any further and the damp fiver I'd arrived with spent at the bar, we
caught the bus again and set off for home through the quiet, rain-lashed
streets.
Andy was too drunk to point out any of the town's highlights, just as I
was too drunk and preoccupied to care, both of us hunched forward
slightly and swaying with every jolt, Andy hiccupping softly.
It wasn't a long journey, only twenty minutes or so until we were getting
off at the edge of a quiet council estate, drawn in on itself, hostile, the
grey pebble dashed houses glowing dully in the moonlight. We turned
away from it and set off down a side street to Andy's place, halfway down
a street of terraced houses with overgrown front gardens.

Andy’s house was Number 26, the garden equally untended, a rusty
climbing frame sunk in the middle of it all. There was a vestibule with
flaking, lime green paint in which a child's bike stood, bags of
newspapers piled up, shoes scattered everywhere, coats hanging from
pegs.

As I stood in it, wiping my feet on the mat I realised how bad I smelled.
Smoke and spilled booze, wet, unwashed clothes. I took off my long black
cardigan, stuffed it into the canvas bag I was carrying. Then we went in.

Michelle was standing, fidgeting in the hallway, slightly surprised, full of

questions. Where had we been, why were we so late? Explaining to us
that she'd been getting anxious, she'd thought we were going to be half
an hour, that's what Andy had said. Had we eaten? Andy ignoring her,
taking off his jacket and hanging it over the end of the banister.
Before I had time to introduce myself she had already darted nervously
back into the kitchen, muttering to herself.

I went up to the bathroom and spent as long in there as I reasonably

could before coming quietly back down the stairs again, tiptoeing so as
not to wake the kids. They were in the living room talking in rapid,
hushed voices that suddenly stopped as they heard me get to the bottom
of the stairs. Not so suddenly, however, that I didn't here her saying that
she had a right to know who was going to be staying under her
roof, that it was her house too, as Andy repeated wearily "alright, alright,
alright." I tapped at the door and then stuck my head round it just as
Michelle disappeared again through the door at the far end to
get the tea tray.

Even though we'd worked together for the best part of eighteen months,
even though we'd told each other everything, or so I thought, seeing him
at home, with his wife, sitting stiff with tension on his own
settee as I eased myself down into the armchair opposite, I suddenly
felt that I didn't know him at all.

"Everything alright?" I asked. I had a sudden stab of anxiety that I was

going to be sent back out into the night.

Andy nodded his head and rolled his eyes to say: she's at it again. For a
moment I thought perhaps I should go out to the kitchen where I could
hear the tea things knocking against each other and introduce myself,
offer to lend a hand, but then she was back, carrying a tray with an
ornate teapot in the middle, piled with cups and saucers, sugar bowl, milk
jug, an array of spoons.

"The table Andy, the table!" she stage whispered as she approached,
smiling, still not looking directly at me. Andy heaved himself up out of
the sofa, scowling, to drag the glass-topped coffee table
closer to where we were sitting.

She was much as I'd imagined her. Short and pear-shaped, her light
brown hair bob length and tucked behind her ears. Grey eyes small and
nervous, thin wrists, big ankles. I sat forward in my chair expectantly
with a smile fixed on my face. She busied herself with the cups, only
glancing up at me once during the whole process to ask, "sugar?"
heaped teaspoon paused above the cup. Seeing my nod, my voice stuck in
my throat, she quickly looked back down again and went about the
sluicing and spooning, the pouring and stirring.

"I already told you I don't want one," Andy said, his voice slurring as she
tried to hand him a cup, her hand shaking so much that tea kept slopping
over into the saucer.

" Fine," she said, smiling, and put it back on the tray, picked up mine and
handed it to me, looking just slightly off to the right of my face as I
mumbled my thanks. Then there was a silence in which we
both looked intensely preoccupied with our tea drinking, as though it
was some exotic new activity we were trying out for the first time.
Silence.
Then. "Oh no, Andy, you know, not in here." Andy was rolling a
cigarette and scattering tobacco crumbs all over the brown settee. He
stood, gestured to me, headed for the backdoor. I put my teacup down
and smiled apologetically at Michelle. She was staring furiously down at
the floor on one side of her chair now, her foot tapping, her cheeks
flushed.

"Well I'm just going to wash up and go to bed then," she shouted back
over her shoulder.

We smoked a roll-up in the garden and drank a can of cider Andy had
taken from the fridge, Michelle banging cupboard doors and rattling
plates around in the sink behind us. It was still raining and the square of
lawn at the back of the house was a little more than a square of darkly
glistening mud.

We smoked in silence, taking our time, then once she'd gone to bed we
went back into the living room to drink more cider. A nightcap. Andy
put some music on, some live Hendrix and started shaking his head
asking "what happened to that spirit, where has it gone?"

After about twenty minutes Michele knocked on the floor and Andy
turned it down fractionally, roll-up drooping between his lips, dropping
ash on the carpet then grinding it in more deeply trying clumsily to clean
it up.
Fifteen minutes later she knocked again and at that point we were more
or less out of cider anyway, except for the couple of inches Andy always
kept to sort his hangover out first thing in the morning.
 He showed me up the stairs to my room, apologizing that he hadn't had
time to sort it out, that it was still full of crap. I tried to get undressed as
quietly as possible but I knocked over a brush that clattered against some
paint tins, sent a box of screws with a loose top tumbling to the floor,
swayed and sat down on the bed with a thump as I tried to get my
trousers off.

Lying in the narrow single bed that night, unable to sleep, I felt as
wretched as I'd ever felt, totally lost, an absolute failure. Even those
nights that I had lain awake beside Rachael through the cold
December and January months, looking at the back of her head and
wishing she would turn toward me, instead of sleeping on in all her
indifference I had never felt so isolated as this. I rolled over on my side
and imagined her with David. How he'd be consoling her, secretly
delighted that I was gone. I tried to masturbate, but I was too drunk and
so after a few minutes, with my head pounding and bile crawling up my
chest I gave up and drifted off into a dry-mouthed, dreamless sleep.

Down beside the bed there was a green army kit bag. Two days earlier I
had packed in everything I thought I would need until I could arrange
some way of getting back to pick up the rest of my things. It contained
my meager supply of clothes, mostly band t-shirts and a few pairs of
black or khaki army pants, a couple of pairs of socks and underpants.
Most importantly of all of course there were books.

As long as I had a few books with me I felt that nothing could really go
wrong, salvation was always to hand, and almost half of the thick, two-
foot long tube was stuffed with them, along with numerous cassettes of
favourite albums that I had scraped together at the last moment, plus the
Walkman to play them on.
I had also brought my notebook, a black Moleskine that Rachael had
bought me for Christmas 2005 for the novel I was always thinking of
beginning and which instead I was in the process of filling up with
quotes. At some point, once it was full, I could reappraise it all and see in
effect what my own philosophy was, build a clear idea of myself up out
shreds and patches of other people's thoughts. I myself, as of yet, had
nothing interesting to say.

The very first I copied down was, "Stay true to the dreams of thy youth,"
from Schiller and which Melville had apparently hung above the desk on
which he wrote. The next was from Blaise Pascal, "The natural
misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that when
we consider it closely, nothing can console us." I wrote them down,
solemnly and drunkenly one Sunday evening. Another quote that stung
me when I read it and which I scribbled down in the book too was Yeats’,
“Had they but courage equal to desire, they would hurl the little streets
upon the big" from "Easter 1916".
I remember nearly all of the books that were in my kit bag that night, as I
spent the next few days reading and rereading them, only pausing to go
out to the off-licence to buy cider or sneak downstairs to eat something
once I was certain that Michelle or the kids were out of the house. It was
a motley selection of literature and philosophy. " Erotica," by George
Bataille, "Les Chants de Maldoror," " Discipline and Punish" "An Artaud
anthology." Books I'd bought second hand or borrowed from friends,
books that seemed to me to be essential, to reveal the hidden working of
the world and whose knowledge I stored up as a secret reserve that got
me through the days. I saw through to the roots of things with their help
and once I had synthesized all that they had taught me I
would launch my insights on the world and the world would be forced to
change.
I read ravenously, with a desperate hunger, as though reading could save
me finally from the daily attrition, the slow starvation I was inflicting on
myself. Each book was an air pocket I lunged for when I felt the
narrowness of my life begin to smother me, building up reserves of
sustenance that I would feed on through the long, lean years to come.

From a bad start, things at Andy's went rapidly downhill. I avoided

Michelle as much as possible, largely out of embarrassment and the
certainty that we would be incapable of communicating with each other.
I was also certain that she resented me as a bad influence, a destructive
influence on her forty-two year old husband, a man slowly sliding into
full blown alcoholism who spent all their money drinking, who came
home drunk every night and who had now, against her wishes, moved
his long-haired, irresponsible, smart-mouthed, twenty-six year old
drinking crony into the spare room. Who can blame her for her
resentment, or her anger?

For the first few days I hid in that little room among the buckets and
paint tins, the DIY things, my books and clothes piled up here and there,
the Walkman glued to my ears. I woke up late, into the mid-day grey,
listened intently to try and find if the house was inhabited, hoping that
somehow everyone was out. Andy had told me that Michelle wasn't
working anymore. She'd had to give up her job at B&Q for reasons of ill
health, some unspecified condition that sent her off to the doctor's
every few weeks with a new set of complaints and that kept her in the
house where, the kids at school, she had nothing to do but sit and listen
to her body, attend closely and vigilantly to all the oddness and
wrongness of her physical state, whatever her general undiagnosable
complaint was, with its shoals of small symptoms. A strange bubbling
sensation in her lower gut. Cold finger tips that she couldn't get warm no
matter how close she held them to the gas fire. A strange metallic taste on
the back of her tongue. Motes in her peripheral vision. All the
background noise of physical being that most people are too busy to pay
attention to, that most people filter out, but which Michele instead
hunted down, sitting silently panicking in the front room, her sharp little
head cocked to one side and her plump fingers worrying at the sleeves of
her jumper. Sitting and listening to all the soft ticks and twinges
multiplying, until, heart-racing she was reaching for the phone and
calling Andy at work in a frenzy, asking him what he thought was
wrong. Explaining that she'd spoken to her mother or to a friend, to the
doctor and could he pick up something from the chemist's for her on the
way home? She was too worried about it all to go out.
Andy would tell her again and again, you're not supposed to phone me at
work unless it's an emergency. I used to hear her on the other end of the
line shouting tearfully at him, "it's not my fault, Andy! I'm not well!"

"She just wants some attention, she doesn't know what to do with her
time," he would say wearily, and go back to his book.

Though it was a small house, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs

along with my box room, the big living room and drawing room they had
knocked into one and the small kitchen downstairs, somehow we
contrived, over the first three days, not to come into contact with each
other at all. I danced around her, paused in one room hearing footsteps
going across the landing, waited until I was sure where she was
before I stole quietly and quickly between rooms. Michelle seemed to
spend most of her day on the telephone in the living room, the sliding
doors pulled closed, the gas fire up so high that even in the landing and
the kitchen it was stifling. Probably she was just as keen to avoid me.

I ate virtually nothing those first three days. I was sleeping for twelve or
more hours at a stretch, waking up late and sick from the night before
with only the last few hours of daylight to kill before I met Andy for a
pint. We got back late, around last orders, pissed on more cheap cans of
super strength lager we sneaked down in the only town center pub, The
Tradesman’s, that Andy thought had any decent songs on the jukebox.
We sat there listening to the songs he put on over and over again, to Pink
Floyd, Dylan and Hendrix, as though through sheer cyclical repetition
some kind of wormhole would be opened up that could get us back to
those days.
By nine everything was a blur, by ten we were swallowing beer
methodically, ritually, in semi-silence, incapable of even rolling a
cigarette and smoking the gritty dog ends of earlier rollups trawled from
the ashtrays instead, the lighter flame doubling and tripling before our
eyes, the world a great, soft, edgeless blur, our own thoughts ground
down to a few stock phrases that chimed painlessly against the back of
our eyes.
We'd missed having anything to eat again, but we could eat tomorrow, if
our stomachs were up to it. Perhaps we should have a night off
tomorrow, get a curry instead, we agreed, but then tomorrow never
arrived.

What couldn't be avoided though was the dole office.

My most pressing concern that week was signing on. I had been lucky
enough to have my temporary contract in the warehouse extended for a
few months after Christmas and the end of my job had more or less
coincided with leaving Rachael and getting out of Leeds. I'd had a few
weeks money in hand to fall back on, but that was almost gone and now I
needed income support.

I needed to go to the Job Centre to make a new claim. I'd resolved to go

every day but had ended up sleeping late. I decided that on the Thursday
morning I would get up early and make it down there for when it
opened, be the first in. Then if necessary I could always come back to
number twenty-six and sleep.

The night before we listened to music as usual, drinking Cider and

blowing smoke out of the living room window into the bitterly cold,
February night until half past one or so and when the time to get up came
around I was still drunk, desperately dehydrated and hungry. I needed a
shower and something to eat but as soon as I woke up I could hear that
everyone was in the house, moving about, going through the early
morning routines of getting ready for work, getting the kids up and
dressed for school.
For the past few mornings I had slept through it all but this morning
there was no avoiding them, unless I simply got dressed, waited and went
straight out. I sat on the end of the bed in my underpants for a few
minutes feeling faint, my stomach balled in on itself, my throat cracked
and painful. There was a pint glass full of yellowish, oxygenated tap
water next to the bed that had been there for a few days.
I drank it down. Feeling slightly better I pulled on my trousers and a t-
shirt, thinking that if I went fast enough I might make it to the bathroom
without bumping into anyone.

As soon as I creaked open the door, there was Anna, the daughter, eight
years old, standing in the middle of the landing in her school uniform.
"Hello," I croaked. She stared at me for a few moments with her bottom
lip out, then ran into her bedroom and began whispering to someone in
there. Her brother, Martin. The two of them giggling. Here I was then,
the mysterious creature that inhabited the box room, whose huge, scuffed
boots stood in the vestibule. As I strode past the door to their room I saw
them both duck excitedly back behind the door and then burst out
laughing.
For some reason this affected me and as I sat down on the toilet I found
my hands were shaking. What am I doing here? I asked myself over and
over again. It was obvious that I didn't belong here and I told myself once
again that this must be temporary. I must go somewhere else, do
something else. But then my thought ran aground. Where else could I go?
My sister's? My parents'?
My stomach was bad even by my standards. After a few hot, sour minutes
I came out of the bathroom and stood at the top of the stairs listening to
the activity below, Michele nagging the kids to eat their breakfast, to
hurry up, Andy stomping around still drunk, probably looking for the last
of the cider he'd hidden the night before. I couldn't face going downstairs
and into the thick of it, the kids staring at me, Michele inspecting the
floor, Andy tense and silent. Instead, I went back to my box room and
pulled my socks and cardigan on, scraped some change together. Then I
came straight down the stairs and out the front door, closing it as quietly
as I could behind me.

It was a damp, grey morning, like having a filthy dishrag shoved in your
face the moment you step outdoors and as I stood at the bus stop counting
out the fare and squinting at the timetable I could feel the rain start to
soak into my clothes. I was wearing several layers of t-shirt and a hooded
top under my big, musty cardigan. I didn't own a coat at that point. After
a few minutes I was shivering. By the time the bus arrived I could feel
the sweat mingling with the rain water that had soaked through.

This didn't concern me overly. I was used to feeling bad. I was used to
living within low-grade physical and emotional distress, either drunk or
chronically hung over. Bad guts, a bad head, paranoid, sweaty. But I
could tell, as the bus ground around the estate picking them all up before
it set of for the centre of town, that I was coming down with something.

Five minutes later I could hardly swallow. I rested my head on the cool
chrome bar on top of the seat in front until someone sat in it. Then I tried
to cool the left side of my face against the window. Burning up.
The centre of the town seemed unnaturally quiet as I lunged my way
toward the dole office through a concrete precinct in which most of the
shops seemed to have been closed down. The occasional, defeated face. I
had one hand up at my throat feeling the swollen glands, waves of hot
and cold sweat breaking over me. An old woman stopped and watched
disapprovingly as I lumbered past and crossed the road to the DSS. In
through the doors and into the stale air, the strip lights, the grey and
cream paintwork, the dense, stain-proof carpet rich with static, blue
plastic boards advertising jobs for security guard and sales men, data-
input clerks, forklift truck drivers.
"New claims?" I asked a young girl in heavy make up sitting at the
enquiries desk.

"Upstairs," she told me in a thick voice. Sick to death of us all already, and
only five minutes into her working day.

I was deteriorating fast, exponentially, and climbing the single flight of

stairs was an ordeal. Pushing through the blue fire door into the New
Claims department I felt my fingers slip on its cheap plastic surface, the
tips greased with sweat now.

There were three people standing in a line at the big, semicircular 'New
Claims' desk, three more seated, paper slips in hand, waiting to be seen. I
joined the queue and then immediately needed to sit down. My head had
ballooned to twice its normal size and lifting a hand to my face it felt as if
my skin was as thick and tough as elephant's hide. There was a small dark
spot worrying away at the centre of my vision. It split then separated
again and again until my eyes were swarming with black dots. I could
feel the blood falling away from my brain in a long cold stream.
I need to sit down.
"I excuse me, I……" I announced to no-one. Then for the first time in my
adult life, I passed out.

Once I came round I was taken back in a taxi to number twenty-six.

Michelle had to pay for it as I had no money, standing red faced and
flustered on the doorstop with her dressing gown pulled tight around her.

I went straight to bed and spent the next three or four days in Andy's
house with a raging fever, stumbling, sweating in my underwear or
wrapped in the damp bedclothes to drink water from the bathroom tap,
to vomit it up in long blood-marbled strands along with the painkillers
and antibiotics that I had just swallowed, to let go of what ever last black
dregs my guts were holding on to.
 Day and night I was back and forth to the bathroom at all hours, filling
the house with noise and stench. standing swaying outside the door if it
was busy, with bedclothes draped around me like a winding sheet,
deathly pale, the hair plastered back off my head and hanging in knots,
something from an Old Testament nightmare. On one such trip,
swimming across the dark upstairs landing I heard Michelle and Andy
arguing below. Shouting and slamming doors. "As soon as he's well
enough he goes, Andy," and Andy's low, drunken "alright, alright,
alright." But at that exact moment I couldn't have cared less. All I wanted
to do was sleep and sweat out whatever fever was coursing its way
through me. When I'm well I'll go anywhere, take on anything. The
prospect of having a bed to lie in for a few days was enough.

But Andy felt responsible for me, good man that he was. He wouldn't
simply throw me out without having found somewhere else for me to go,
without giving me an alternative.

I had actually met Robert Hanson briefly a week or so before I moved

into his house. I couldn't have known of course what significance he
would assume in my life. I couldn't at that stage have known what he
was. What he would later be revealed to be. At that stage he was just
another small-town hard man, another criminal, another thug, and not
even an especially distinguished one.

That night we took a different bus route back to Andy's, one that dropped
us off in the middle of the estate leaving us a walk of half a mile or so
back to his place and the bottles of chilled, golden cider waiting in his
fridge. On our way, shuffling through the cold, we passed a dark,
redbrick pub squatting in the middle of an empty car park. The tarmac
was littered with empty cans and broken bottles, steel shutters were
pulled down over the windows. It would have been easy to believe that
the pub was deserted if not for the noise drifting out, the thin glare from
the doorway. I could tell by the fact that Andy started counting out his
change and scrabbling around in his pockets for any stray coins that
might have got lost in the lining that we would be going in there. We
paused under a streetlight, counting out coppers in the soft yellow glow,
our breath white, ears stinging. Enough for a pint each. And so we went
across the car park to the door. I remember being struck by the
pub's name. The Forded Man.

I was apprehensive but I was also drunk and keen to have another pint, a
nightcap. I wasn't going to raise any objections. You don't turn down a
pint and besides, I was with Andy, a local. He was certainly no more of a
fighter than I was but he would be able to vouch for me at least.

We went in. There was something terse and final about the place, a
waiting room for those whose appointment has been permanently
postponed. It seemed to have had most of its fixtures and fittings stripped
out. No music, the floor was old lino, the seating a selection of stools and
chairs that looked as though they'd been salvaged from a skip. A series of
sagging trellis tables. The lighting bright and bare, the air blue with fag
smoke, the smell of stale beer sweating out of everything.
We leant on the bar and ordered two pints. The place was half full. This
was a local’s pub even by Castleford standards. The usual assortment of
lads and lasses, petty criminals, big men, slags, pissheads, druggies, doleys,
decent blokes. The only thing we all had in common was the need for a
pint, a love of the booze, a sense of homelessness, all our deepest desires
fulfilled by a lock-in so we could go sailing off together in the semi-dark
and the familial hush, get a couple of quid in the kitty and cruise on into
the small hours, chewing away at ourselves, trying to gnaw out our
hopes, stubborn as they were.

What a curse that hope is the last thing to die. I glanced around quickly
and then kept my head down, careful not to catch anyone's eye. Drink
quickly and get out. Andy had told me that the year before there had
been a fire, arson they thought, at one of the schools on the estate and
that once it had been put out the parents helped their kids to loot it.

"Looting the school their own fucking kids go to," Andy told me, smiling
grimly and shaking his head. “I don't want my kids going there."

I inspected the space behind the bar, scrutinised the peanuts hanging on
their greasy cardboard sheet, flicked the specks of fag ash on the bar,
gazed intently at the single photo adorning the jerry-built plasterboard
wall to the left of me that marked off the toilets, a black and white still of
Marilyn Monroe, her skirt blowing up around her 1950's ears.

Suddenly Andy was talking to someone.

I heard, "who the fuck is this…" and a few seconds later I was introduced.
There it was. I found myself shaking hands with Robert Hanson. His dry,
calloused hand crushing mine, hard as he could, testing me out, eyes
locked on my eyes.

"What do you want?" he asked.

For a moment I didn't understand what he meant

"Sorry…"

For a moment, dragged out of my reverie, with the intensity of his grip
and his glare I thought that his question was broader, deeper.

"What do you fucking want to fucking drink?"

"He'll have a pint of Lager," Andy said.

"Fucking Lager," Robert Hanson said as he released my hand and turned

to the bar. "John! Five more of same and a fucking Lager," he told the fat,
pockmarked barman, who snapped to attention, belly jiggling. We stood
stiffly as he sorted the drinks out, Robert Hanson brandishing a twenty
pound note, a John Player Special gripped tight in his thin lips. Then we
followed him outside, where groups of men were gathered smoking,
sitting at benches on opposite sides of the square of grey crenellated
concrete that passed for a garden. Andy nodded to a few of them. They
stared at me.

"He's with me," Andy said, then turning to me. “There's been a fight."
There were two pools of blood thick and dark on the concrete and a guy a
few years younger than me sitting off to one side of the two main groups,
talking to Robert Hanson, his face badly bruised, one eye almost swollen
closed, hands bandaged. Andy nodded across to the ten or so men
gathered on the other side of the car park.

"Gypos." He had swig of his pint. " Looks like we won."

"Nice," I said. I looked up through a plume of my own misting breath to

the night sky. Everything in its place, bright and changeless. I have
always been here. I will always be here. Just another idiot craning
upward.

Then Robert Hanson was back over with us, taking Andy to one side to
speak to him in a low voice, leaving me to stare at my feet and drink my
pint, try not to think about the pools of blood slowly freezing in the
bitter cold or listen to the laughter of the men (1) around the table
making jokes at my expense.

Two minutes later we left, and I was glad to be out of there. Twenty
minutes after that we were huddled up around the gas fire in Andy's
house, deeply involved in the cider, all life's promise splashing out into
our mugs, each frothing, gassy gulp taking us one step closer to that
fragrant, edgeless realm where nothing could touch us.
And so it was that within a week of having arrived I had been delivered,
totally without means and at my lowest ebb, into the hands of Robert
Hanson.

My exit strategy was a trip to Ipswich, to stay with my friend Nick. To

get there, I had to get a Giro. For that I needed an address.

Money was scarce. Coppers mattered, fifty pence was a poor meal,
loosing a pound a disaster. No matter how you divided it up, tried to
economize, the dole wasn’t enough to live on. Least of all if you needed
to drink, and being stuck down there, wedged in at the very bottom, at
the mercy of the state and facing a lifetime of counting out the pennies
and worrying about the bills, who wouldn’t want to drink?

So when the opportunity to stay at Robert Hanson’s place for two weeks
came up, I couldn’t say no. I had no money and couldn’t face asking
anyone for a loan. Certainly not Andy, who had been generous enough to
me. Nor could I ask for any more from my parents. For the first time in
my life I risked slipping completely under the radar. No Fixed Address.

Robert Hanson would be out of town for two weeks, down on the south
coast sorting out runs from Dover back up north, truckloads of cheap fags
and booze smuggled in from France. His wifeMary would be there. I
could have a bed in return for helping around the place. What kind of
helping out? I asked Andy. I panicked slightly, having no practical skills
whatsoever. Mowing the lawn, shifting boxes around, clearing stuff out.
Mary’s not much of a one for housework, he told me. They’ve got a girl in
to do the tidying up, look after the kids and that. He sniffed. Officially,
they’re on the dole. Fucking au-pair, on the dole.

Two weeks, that was all I would need. The wife and kids I could handle,
then out before Andy’s brother came back. I’d been rescued, fortune had
smiled on me. I felt chirpy as I packed my bag. Something will turn up
was my default position then, as it always is for people who lack self-
discipline or will but consider themselves charming, charmed. Something
had turned up. Of course. I loaded up my things and after a rather
embarrassing attempt to thank Michelle for her kindness as she and Andy
stood uncomfortably in the hallway, I set off across town again on the
bus.

Get me out of here, I was saying to myself as we stopped every hundred

yards. The town itself meant nothing to me, a few shopping precincts and
council estates, pubs. It wasn’t a place to me, Castleford, so much as a
state. There was something imploded about it, somewhere at its heart
there was a ragged hole slowly sucking the little colour and life that had
been there out of the air, leeching lives away. One grey, defeated face
after another.

If I stay here I will become like them, face slowly collapsing around a
cigarette end, shuffling along with my eyes down, broken, sullen,
skulking, vicious. If I stay here I will become what I always hoped to
escape. The momentum I had when I was younger and all the effort my
parents made, all my dreams of something more will have succumbed to
gravity and fallen back on themselves. The gravity of class, of your
background.
I looked at my own reflection in the bus window as we passed under a
redbrick railway bridge. Thin, tired, scooped out. Am I strong enough to
break its grip or will I float here, decommissioned, in the dim, airless
band between worlds?

The sun had come weakly out, there was a sense of spring in the air. I had
a burst of optimism, was sure that I could take advantage of the situation,
seize the moment, let it lead on to sure success. I will. Finally I will.

Andy had given me a map of sorts, biro-ed onto the back of a beer mat,
and after a few wrong turns I actually came upon the street, Angel Road,
from the opposite end. It was a row of towering redbrick terraced houses
that ran down to a set of loosely fenced off fields and a swathe of open
countryside beyond. There had been plans for more, a whole estate, but
for some reason they had never been built. Number fifty, my destination,
stood alone. Number forty eight had partially burned down and then
been demolished several years before, and in its place there was an
overgrown square of mud and masonry (2).

I was always tense about meeting new people, especially given the way I
dressed, scruffy, student-y, long haired and the way I tended to speak.
Not the accent, I had the advantage at least of not being a Southerner, but
the way I tended to phrase things, my choice of words. I experienced my
customary desire to flee, to walk past, to keep walking, but of course I
had nowhere to walk to. I fantasized in a flash that somehow I would
simply be able to melt into the fields beyond, into the forest, become
invisible, bodiless, sustain myself on dappled light and stillness.
Instead I raised a fist, knocked at the door and waited, gazing out over the
fields, watching rays of light rake the distant hills. The world was
inclining further and further toward the sun. I closed my eyes and let its
thin promise soak into my skin. New beginnings are afoot.

Mary Hanson took a long time to answer and I drifted off into a shallow
reverie. Suddenly she was at the door, her long greying hair scraped back
off her head and hanging in two dripping slats, that great round face with
its little upturned nose and boggled eyes. Her neck all mottled fuchsia
and pig-pink. A huge, white bathrobe pulled over her bulk.

“I were in the bath,” she told me crossly, face screwed up, scrutinizing
me. Then she turned and let me in.

It was dark in the hallway and entering from the sunlight, for a moment I
couldn’t see anything at all. The house was damp, I could smell that
immediately. I could also smell dogs, a deep, musky scent that I felt in the
back of my throat. I paused for a second, blinking, waiting for the hall to
fade in. It seemed to come to me as though over a great distance, sliding
in to dock with the doorway. It was piled high with cardboard boxes and
black bin bags stuffed with clothes. Mary Hanson was already waiting for
me, scowling and holding open the living room door so I could glance
inside, giving me a tour of the place. It was a drab, old fashioned room
with antique furniture and thick, red flock wallpaper with roses engraved
in it. It too was filled with boxes

“You’ll have to shift them lot out back, put them in shed,” Mary Hanson
told me, glancing back over her shoulder as she shuffled back along the
corridor and I dutifully followed her, trying to make appropriate noises
and gestures. I was shown the cluttered dining room strewn with
magazines and comics, clothes, more boxes, the big dining table covered
in empty bottles and cans, overflowing ashtrays. Next, the dirty kitchen,
several week’s worth of dishes piled up in the sink, the mud-streaked
tiles, the sticky surfaces, the encrusted cooker, the bags of empty bottles,
and then, out through the greasy window, the neglected garden. I stood
taking it in for a moment, nodding appreciatively, watching a mob of flies
careen around in boxy circuits below the bare light bulb as Mary Hanson
went back down the passageway and began to climb the stairs. Showing
me to my room. Since giving me my instructions about the boxes she
hadn’t uttered another word, had asked me no questions, made no
attempt to find out anything about me.

My room was one of the two on the top floor, at the gable’s end. It was
narrow and dusty with a sloping ceiling that meant I could only stand up
straight in a narrow strip of space just inside the doorway. The bed was
jammed into the alcove at the lowest point, probably no more than two
feet high where the roof met the outside wall. Half coffin. Other than the
bed there was a dark, teak wardrobe against the opposite wall that
prevented the door from being opened fully and which leaned ominously
forward as if it were about to topple over. The curtains were faded,
yellow flowers on a white background, the net curtains grey and papery
with age, but at least through the small sash window there was a view of
the fields. There was also a smell of piss and of something rotting. For a
moment I was unsure whether it was the room or Mary Hanson herself
that was giving off the smell. I dropped my bag at the foot of the bed as
Mary headed for the bathroom.

Two weeks.
I looked into the bathroom. The small cracked enamel tub with it’s rusted
taps, the incongruous pink plastic toilet they’d plumbed in, the toothpaste
spattered sink.

Then it seemed that the tour was over. I watched Mary Hanson’s great
back as it moved away from me toward the stairs that lead down to the
second floor and the bath she’d been wallowing in. Was that it?

I hesitated for a second. “When would you like me to move the boxes?” I
called out after her.

“No time like present,” she told me without looking back. I caught sight
of her profile as she turned to descend the short second flight, groping for
clues. But there was no recognizable trace of feeling on her face.

“You can give Billy a hand,” she said.

I recognized him immediately, coming out of the garden shed as I came
out of the back kitchen door. The young guy I’d seen the week before in
the beer garden with his knuckles bandaged.

His face was still swollen and discoloured round the eyes. He was
stripped to the waist pulling crates out onto the large concreted-over area
at the back of the house. Patio would have been a generous description
for it. It looked as though someone had dumped a large quantity of
cement in the garden then simply spread it out and let it set, it was
amorphous, borderless, more like a crumbling grey landmass than
anything planned.

Billy stood in the shed doorway and looked at me. He wasn’t especially
tall, Billy, five seven maybe, but he had the look of someone who had
spent his life dishing out and taking beatings. A hammered quality, his
whole face screwed around his flattened nose, his eyes pink slits, his
mouth a bloodless crease, as though he were trying to suck his face back
into his head, keep it out of harm’s way. I suppose he had had to suck
everything into himself to keep it from being harmed.

“I’ve come to give you a hand,” I said.

“Pick sumat fuckin up then,” he told me. His hands were clenched tight
at his sides, his body angled slightly forward. The thin salty odour of his
sweat was being carried across the concrete to me on the slight breeze.

I nodded, kept my eyes down, hunched forward even more, instinctively

trying to appear smaller, subservient. Fucking hell, this one’s on a hair
trigger. Already I was trying to come up with ways I could refer to my
recent experience in warehouse work, make him realize that I wasn’t
exactly what he assumed me to be, that I’d done my share of grafting.

He snorted, spat with a quick stab of his head, left a brownish streak of
phlegm on the dusty concrete, then turned back into the shed.

“Where’s it going?” I asked.

“Living room,” he shouted back. “Crates out, boxes in.”

We fell to working, Billy hoisting up two beer crates at a time, stamping

bandy-legged over the concrete into the house and down the fetid hall,
returning with three or four boxes, whereas the best I could manage was
one crate and two boxes. That didn’t bother me. Anything that flattered
Billy’s ego, that kept him unthreatened was fine by me. We passed each
other repeatedly. After the third or fourth time I stopped glancing at him
in the expectation of some recognition or acknowledgement. Knuckle
fucking down, no slacking fucking off. That was Billy’s attitude. A man of
few words.

I say “man”, but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Even so I felt
that he was older than me. I had always felt this way when I went home,
back to Barrow–in-Furness from University, and saw people I’d gone to
school with, sometimes a year or two younger than I was and already
adults in a way I had never felt myself to be. Eighteen years old, married,
a couple of kids, a council flat, a car. The way they dressed, chunky rings
and chains, some of them with moustaches even, standing splay legged at
the bar in their locals, barrel-chested and beer-bellied, swilling down
pints, shouting at each other from the side of their mouths as though
somehow at sixteen, going off into the shipyard had magically
transformed them into facsimiles of their fathers.

Next to them I felt myself to be a child, a boy, still. And even though I
was several years older than him, it was immediately that way with Billy.
The threat of violence. He was expert in it and I was an absolute novice.
He had all the authority on his side and our ages didn’t mean a thing.

After half an hour or so I was sweating heavily and had taken off my
cardigan and the long-sleeved T-shirt I was wearing, wanted a break but
knew it was out of the question. There were still plenty of boxes and
crates to be moved. After an hour I was desperate and Billy was making
two trips to my one, muttering to himself now and spitting repeatedly on
the concrete as he came thumping back out of the kitchen door. More
than anywhere I could feel it in the small of my back, in my shoulders, in
the tendons in my forearms.
You’re weak in a domain that values physical strength, hesitant in a
domain that values action, passive in a domain that values aggression.
You can not live here, you never could, but where can you live?

And so I picked up another crate and felt my legs bend under the load,
something coarse-grained throb in my left eye, all the trelliswork up my
back creak and throb. The grooved plastic cut into my fingers. I caught
sight of myself in the kitchen window every time I turned to
lumber back into the house, strands of hair plastered to my forehead, my
face gaunt and pale, my mouth tight, stooped, the crate bumping against
my thin thighs and my soft, burgeoning beer gut. I felt a combination of
anger and revulsion for myself, envy and disdain for Billy as again he
came back through the doorway, boxes stacked in his indefatigable arms.
Ah, but I have read and one day soon I’ll write such things! All this will
be dignified then, all this will be justified, everything that’s wrong put
right, all the misalignments brought into true.

Finally, by 6:00, the sun down behind the hills and the air getting cold,
we were done. Billy cracked open a can and stood there in the shed
doorway chugging it down, his Adam’s apple jabbing at his chin, his
stomach concaved.
I hovered in front of him for a moment until it became clear that he
wasn’t going to speak to me first or offer me a drink.
“Alright. So. See you later,” I said. And then when it quickly became
obvious that there would be no reply I retreated to my room, just to get
away for a while, escape from my own desperate thirst for a drink and
the cramped surroundings, bury my nose in a book, hold time up and
away.
 I had barely settled in when there was someone tapping at my door. I
froze on the bed, hadn’t heard any footsteps on the stairs and I thought it
might be Billy, come padding softly up there to drag me back out to
work, or worse. I had, as I always do at moments of panic, or surprise, no
matter how mild, the immediate idea that if I simply didn’t respond they
would go away. That if I ignored it, it would disappear. But of course it
didn’t disappear, it came again, the light rapping at the door.

I dragged myself up from the lumpy bed to answer it, and there was
Agnes. The last of Robert Hanson’s victims.

“Hello,” she said in a thick accent. “ I come say hello.” Her large, almost
colourless eyes. “ I come say hello.”

This is where we cluster, the uncertain, the oversensitive, the brutalized,

the abandoned, down here at the bottom.

“Would you like to go downstairs?” I asked her on an impulse. I didn’t

want her in the room, then I might never get her out. She looked at me
blankly. I wasn’t sure how much English she understood. My heart sank
at the prospect of having a new friend who couldn’t understand anything
I said.

“Downstairs, ok,” she said.

And so we went downstairs. Agnes first, her heavy footfalls on the stair,
her small, round head, like a partridge’s, wobbling on its long stem, her
dry hair cut into a bob, all the split ends in a soft fuzz against the light as
we descended. Poor, unlovely Agnes, miles from home.

The noise from the ground floor grew steadily louder. Billy was still here
and by the sound of things had been joined by others. Nervously, I tried
to make conversation as we came down the last flight of stairs. Do you
live here too, then? Yes. What do you do? I help with children. You’re an
au pair? An au pair? An au pair, yes. I wash clothes, go supermarket for
buy food.

And Robert Hanson rapes me, she might have said. He rapes me while his
wife watches. And before long he will murder me. (3)
The next day, as soon as I woke up I stumbled to the bathroom to vomit.
Downstairs Agnes was in the living room cleaning away the things.
When I entered she looked at me blandly and then lowered her face. I
had vague memories of the night before, but the headache was too
intense for me to recall anything clearly. I searched hopelessly around in
the kitchen clutter for anything approximating a clean cup, ransacked
draws for paracetamol and found nothing. Then I went back to the living
room to ask Agnes. Paracetamol? For a headache. She heaved herself up
from the floor where she was scrubbing at a stain on the carpet with the
head of a brush.

I collapsed on one of the sofas, papers scrunching up beneath me, and

waited, my eyes half closed, a weak light coming in through the French
windows. Last night. I remembered going down into the kitchen to make
tea and being called into the living room. There was some kind of a small
party in swing, Mary standing up beside the table, dolled up for the
evening.

That’s right. We had gone down into the kitchen to drink tea and been
invited into the living room where among the strewn papers and piles of
boxes a get-together of some sort was taking place. Mary Hanson was in
her finery now, wearing a short velvet dress that clung to her arms, the
rolls of fat around her mid-rift and her backside, her hair had been dyed
black and was scraped back into a ponytail. She wore large gold hoop ear
rings. She had applied make-up to her face. Mary directed me to the table
and poured me a large plastic beaker full of whisky. I gulped it down,
needed to get drunk as quickly as possible. Three tough swallows and it
was gone, but there was plenty more where that had come from, I knew.
Mary was watching me.

“You’re proper thirsty, you are,” she said angrily, but nonetheless she
refilled the beaker then pushed the whiskey bottle across the table to me.
“Agnes, get us another bottle from shed.”

Agnes did as she was told.

Billy was sitting on the sofa, smoking a fag, his legs spread wide, another
man I vaguely recognized from the Forded Man beside him, silently
brooding on his tumbler full of whiskey. Charlie.

Agnes filled up everyone’s glass.

After that the memories were blurred, whiskey lit. We began to listen to
music. First Elton John, then a medley of Fifties hits, Agnes off to one
side, sipping on a can of beer that Mary Hanson forced on her and
fidgeting. At some point in the evening everyone was watching me, the
men with amusement and contempt, Mary Hanson with something I
couldn’t quite put my finger on. I tried to downplay my education and
play up my background, the years I’d spent before I went to university,
the back streets, the pubs, the Shipyard, the years after I left, working in
factories and warehouses. I spoke at length about my political convictions
as the drink took hold. Just to assure them that I was on their side, to let
them know where my sympathies lay, that I was one of them. After a
while Billy stopped staring at me and began to stare at Agnes instead.

What else? I screwed my eyes tighter closed against the all-enveloping

dry thunder of the hangover. Mary Hanson and Charlie dancing in the
living room, his callused, loose knuckled hands dug deep into the flesh of
her backside, pulling the skirt up her thighs. Billy staring fixedly at Agnes
as I poured myself another and another, eyeing the clock on the wall, two
o’clock now, now two thirty. At some point Billy dragged Agnes up from
her stool and began to slow dance with her, his hands on her wide hips,
still staring into her down-turned face, whispering something I couldn’t
hear as she rocked from side to side. I kept my eyes on the carpet mostly,
then, when I thought nobody was looking, too immersed in their slow,
drunken circuits around the room I reached out a hand and stole a few
cigarettes from the open packet lying on the other side of the table.
When I looked up and around to see if anyone had noticed I found that
Mary Hanson, though her back was to me, was watching me in the
mirror.
I smiled guiltily. She didn’t smile back

As I sat there with my eyes closed, head throbbing, the night before
filtering back to me, Jessica Hanson came silently into the room and
stood in front of me so that when I opened my eyes, suddenly and
unexpectedly she was there and I half leapt of the sofa with shock.

I laughed. “My God,” I said. But Jessica neither reacted nor said anything,
simply looked at me, her long hair hanging in two thick, golden braids,
her pale, puckish face with its huge dark eyes thrust questioningly
forward, her rubbery, naked legs below the graying sheet she held
clasped at her throat like a cowl. I stared back at her. She looked like
something from a fable. An impossibly old child, carved from soapstone.
There was a large tortoise shell bruise staining her left cheek

“Hello. Who are you?” I asked her.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, her face contorting, her little teeth
going into her bottom lip, the veins in her skinny neck sticking out. Then
Agnes was in, grabbing her hand and pulling her out of the room as
Jessica began kicking and screaming, biting at her hand, Agnes’ big,
pebble pale eyes as clouded and depthless as always (4).
As I lay in bed at night drifting in and out of sleep I could hear the
constant movement between floors and rooms, filtering into my dreams
and shaping them, bringing me round in the dark. Occasionally someone
would mount the final set of stairs and then I lay there holding my breath
until they pushed closed the bathroom door behind them or began
pissing noisily.

Mary Hanson had taken an interest in me it seemed, though her interest

extended to little more than standing stock still and watching me pass on
the occasions we met in the hallway or kitchen, her eyes magnified
enormously behind her thick lenses. I stayed in my room, only
occasionally coming down for food or to sneak drinks out of the kitchen.
From early evening onward there was always a party of some sort going
on in the dining room, Billy and Charlie in residence, along with any
number of other men, Agnes waiting on them all. She was sent upstairs to
invite me in twice. I declined, preferring to lie on the bed and scribble in
my notebook, read, listen to the few cassettes I had brought with me, get
drunk alone.

I tried to keep as low a profile as possible, to be as invisible as the two

children I occasionally saw coming and going. The boy’s room was
directly opposite mine and a few times during the first week I had to tap
on the door to ask for my walkman back. His room was in a state of
incredible disorder even compared the chaos that reigned in the rest of
the house. His life consisted of sitting among it all watching his small
black and white TV, waiting to hear me leave my room so he could sneak
in and steal something. The girl had a room of some sort built onto the
living room. Agnes got them up in the morning, fed them, put them to
bed at night. Though they lived in the same house Mary Hanson would
go days without seeing them. She was too busy with her admirers.

For several nights I traced the party’s progress up the stairs from the
ground floor through the padlocked door on the second floor and into a
room at the front of the house. Later there would be the noise of people
having sex directly below me and sometimes the shouts and complaints
of a child somewhere off to the right. I put my walkman on at such times
to drown it out and resolved firmly that tomorrow would have to be the
day I got into town, got to the DSS, but somehow the next day I would
wake up late and immediately know that today was not the day, sitting
vacantly on the end of the bed until it was too late to go anywhere. Mid
afternoon, while everybody was out I would creep downstairs and steal a
bottle of something.

One night the feet came up the stairs as I lay there awake in the dark,
desperate for more drink but too anxious to go downstairs in case I
bumped into someone. I hoped it was Agnes, who I could readily
persuade to bring me up some more booze, but the footfalls were too
heavy for it to be anyone but Mary Hanson. I tensed up, waiting to hear
her continue on down the small passageway to the bathroom. Almost
immediately the door was flung open and rebounded shivering back off
the foot of the bed as she stumbled forward into the room and swung
round to face me.
“Hiding. Hiding. What you hiding from?” she asked. She was wearing a
low cut green velvet top and a straight black skirt speckled with cigarette
ash. “Hiding up here, aren’t you?” she repeated her eyes shining in the
plane of light knifing in from the corridor. She leant against the door to
close it and almost fell, a series of rapid sideways steps, then it slammed
into its frame. The room was in total darkness again.

I could hear the sound of her begin struggling out of her clothes, her
shoes kicked off, swearing under her breath at a clasp or a zip that had
jammed. Soon she would be heaving her way onto the bed next to me,
jamming me up against the wall. Expecting me to fuck her.

I seemed incapable of warding this eventuality off. I scrabbled around

inside myself for an appropriate response and came back empty-handed. I
lay there, my limbs leaden, my voice caught fluttering in my throat,
helpless as a newborn.

After what seemed an impossible length of time with a great creaking of

springs she lowered herself onto the bed. I shrank back. Up this close the
smell coming off her was thick enough to take a bite out of. Sweat and
piss, stale alcohol and some unidentifiable fungal rot that, with a
panicked flash, I suddenly realised might be, must be, some kind of
infection. I pictured her great raw cunt, half scabbed over, shot with
veins of mould and weeping sores. Her breath, as her face moved into
mine and her hand came grabbing at me under the covers was a
compound of cat-food and old come.
“No. Mary. No. Really.” I said seizing the hand that was fumbling at my
underpants, circling her hot, thick wrist. The wall was cold against my
back, my face burning.

“Come on,” she said, she was panting, with excitement, with the effort of
getting undressed. “Come on, come on.” Her fingers scrabbling at my
crotch, everything retracting.

“Mary. Mary.” I said sternly, ridiculously, trying to shock sense into her.
“You’re married. You’re married.”

“He don’t care,” she said. “ He’s had me out on game while I were
fifteen.” She pressed closer. Her slack tits and her great distended belly,
her hand gone in through the opening in my shorts now. She began
tugging at me. We lay there for a few minutes, nothing but the sound of
her wheezing and the dry, painful snap of her hand at my crotch, until
she gave up.

“Don’t you like girls, then?” She hissed at me.

“Taken all my fucking clothes off for nowt.” She said the last word
contemptuously, dragging herself up and stamping across the floor to
turn on the light. I kept my eyes closed until I was sure she had her
clothes on, then I swung round and sat up on the bed. I wanted to go and
wash my face.

There was flash, a click, a whirring of machinery. I looked up to find her

swaying drunkenly behind a cracked and dirty polaroid instamatic. A
second later the photograph slid out. She shook it into life and regarded it
for a moment.

Then she turned and left.

On the Monday I was set to work to earn my keep. Robert Hanson had
phoned and given instructions that I should help Charlie, attend to his
deliveries. He would pick me up at seven-thirty.
The first night I managed a few hours of sleep and then Charlie was
banging at my door at eight o'clock, shouting that we were late. I washed
in the dirty sink and by eight-fifteen we were sitting in his van, the air
blue with cigarette smoke, Charlie scowling at the road. I had broken his
routine.
"Seven fucking thirty, I said.”
I apologized. I made some excuse about my alarm. I apologized repeatedly
as he sucked down a Craven A. Charlie had done nine-years for armed
robbery. He'd run down to London from Leeds and had been sitting in a
café off the Old Kent Road six months later when he felt the proverbial
hand on his shoulder and knew the game was up. He looked older than
thirty-five, his face dark and deeply lined, his skin tough and lacquered,
his teeth at all angles and rotten with tobacco, the hair sitting on top of
his long, knobbly head like an oak bowl. He looked like a monk.
I could imagine what he thought of me. He had sat staring at me with
contempt a few days before in Mary Hanson's living room and now I had
only confirmed all his prejudices. With Charlie you only had one chance,
one slip and you were marked down for life. If you stayed in bed for too
long, you were lazy, work shy and there was nothing more shameful than
that. I tried not to look too tired as we sat in the cab and Charlie went
through the pieces of notepaper he pulled from the inside pocket of his
leather jacket. After some fumbling and swearing, once he'd mashed the
cigarette out in the crammed ashtray, we set off on our deliveries.
It was our job to drive around Castleford and the outlying towns and
villages providing shops and pubs with knock-off fags and booze. What
we were doing was clearly illegal and, after the first stop to offload a few
crates of whiskey round the back of a pub a ten minute drive or so from
Robert Hanson's house, I was desperately trying to think how I could get
out of it. Perhaps I could pretend to be ill and get back to the house that
way, but telling Charlie that I wasn't feeling well and wanted to go home
and rest was out of the question.
Within a few minutes, my hangover, Charlie's endless cigarettes in the
van's small front compartment, all the silent tension between us, the
possibility that at any moment we might be stopped by the police or
swept upon in some dingy backstreet sting and the speed at which we
driving, combined to have me feeling sick for real. I began to imagine
what it would be like to go to prison. I would be eaten alive in there. If I
went in I would never come out and if I did I would be marked for life,
permanently exiled.
I wound down the window to get some air but didn't dare take it too low.
I told myself that I would have to go through with today and find some
way of getting out of it tomorrow, leave the house if needs be. Of course I
still had no money. I still needed to get to the DSS. I would get a crisis
loan, then I could get out of here quickly. It didn't matter anymore. I
would go to my sister's, to my parents. Anything was better than getting
mixed up in this.
By two we had finished, bundles of notes being passed and pocketed in
back streets and backrooms, fresh orders taken. People were nervous
around Charlie and I began to wonder, after his threatening air in a
corner shop covered in racist graffiti with metal shutters permanently
down over the windows run by an ashen, besieged Bangladeshi couple
whether there wasn't an element of extortion in what he did. Who would
tell Charlie that they no longer required his services?
Back at the house Charlie scowled at me through the van window, telling
me, seven thirty tomorrow. Bang on! The courage to tell him that I
couldn't do it swelled up in me, faltered just long enough for him to have
slammed the van into gear and roared away, and then was swallowed up
again.
The house was quiet, the kids at school, Agnes out somewhere, shopping
probably, Mary Hanson pampering herself in her boudoir somewhere in
the depths of the second floor. I drifted warily through to the kitchen,
thinking Billy might be around someplace.
No-one. There were half-full bottles of whiskey and vodka jostling for
space on the blue Formica covered table next to the door, crates of beer
stacked up beside it. I poured some whiskey into a greasy mug I pulled
out of the sink, topped it off with coke from a two litre bottle in the
fridge. Two o'clock. I couldn't make it into town today anyway, it would
be better to wait and go down first thing tomorrow. I would get up extra
early and get out before Charlie arrived, leave a note on the bed
explaining the situation.
Perfect. I went out into the garden. Spring was coming, a thin,
promissory wash of warmth, the edge of things unfolding. Bloom, bloom,
let life bloom and let me bloom with it, let me unfold. High summer's
boundlessness. Infuse me with it, make me equal to it. I wandered off the
patio and trod a path across the overgrown lawn to the rusty, half-
submerged chair and table in the middle of it all, the grass fanning out
tough and springy beneath my boots.
I sat down and took a few rich, fizzy gulps at the mug, felt it thread my
veins, closed my eyes. Birdsong was fluttering in from somewhere, from
the fields behind the house and I fell into a reverie, little more than a
softly swelling mass of colour and shape, stretched out, put my legs up on
the table, felt the breeze pick at my cuffs, at my trouser legs, light enough
now to be borne over the distant hills, the silent, expectant woods, the
brightly chattering nickel and cobalt streams and on through the mist-
thin skin that separates this world from the next.
The whiskey was drunk and I returned to the kitchen and poured
another, went back to the garden taking the rest of the bottle with me,
sat again, head lolling back, watching the pale, scalloped clouds gentle
process across the sky
By five I had opened another bottle.

The next day I was up at 7:00, light headed with the lack of sleep, my
eyes raw, cursing myself. I had overslept by an hour, had meant to be out
by six forty five and as I headed for the bathroom my heart sank hearing
a vehicle pull up in the street outside. Even as I urged myself to tell
Charlie outright that I couldn’t help him today I knew I didn’t have the
nerve. I sat on the edge of the grimy bath in despair for a few minutes
and then I reconciled myself to it. Today but not tomorrow. Tomorrow I
must, must get up earlier. No drinking today I told myself. Futilely.

Charlie was sitting smoking grimly amongst the heaped rubbish in the
kitchen when I came down. I ate some cornflakes from a dirty bowl, took
a bottle of coke out of the fridge and then we set about another day’s
trading, loading up the van with the orders that Billy had dragged out of
the garage the day before, heading further afield this time, out into the
surrounding countryside, village shops and pubs, dropping off a
large consignment at a series of dilapidated lock ups round the back of
some provincial station and receiving an envelope fat with more money
than I’d ever seen in return. I hung back as the deal went down, leant
against the van sweating and breathless as Charlie exchanged handshakes
and guffaws. Occasionally they glanced back derisorily at me as they
spoke, and I realised that a component in Charlie’s hostility toward me
was embarrassment. He was ashamed of being associated with me.
This time we finished even earlier, by twelve we were done and heading
back to Castleford (5) through the late Winter brightness, the hedgerows
thickening, the trees straining at the sun. I had time to get to the DSS.
We came back through the centre of the town and I jumped out there
with an enormous sense of liberation and mission. I headed for the New
Claims department. I just needed to get onto the system then I could
claim an emergency payment. Today was Tuesday. I could be on there by
the end of the week. By Friday I could be out of here, a week earlier than
I’d planned, but then, the situation was much worse than I had imagined
it would be. My heart was racing at the idea that I could go somewhere,
anywhere. I could still make it to Ipswich to stay with Nick. I felt a stab
of nostalgia, a long pang. I would have someone I could talk
to, someone I could communicate with, someone who understood the
same things I did. I wanted to be around educated people not with people
who looked at me as though I were a freak, who treated me with derision
and contempt.
I had his number folded up on a piece of paper inside one of my books
and I decided I would phone him that night. I needed to speak to
someone, to use my own voice, to stretch it out, to take it off its leash.
I didn’t take the forms back to the house with me, just completed them
there and then with a stubby pen and immediately went to the post office
on the other side of the road to post them. Mission accomplished. By one
thirty I was back at the silent house. Filled with secret mirth, I took a can
of extra strength beer into the living room. There was a slight swagger to
my step. I had outsmarted life. I’d sidestepped fate. I was on my way.
 Two more day’s work with Charlie, I’d get down the DSS on Friday and
beg a loan off them if necessary. Until then I was going to drink as much
as I could. Make the most of it. I stood looking at myself in the big
speckled mirror telling myself, you are headed for great things, believe in
yourself, you’ll do it, you’ll get there. One day you’ll show them all. I
finished the can. Felt it singing in my blood. One day they’ll kneel before
you!

I went back to the kitchen to get another and a slice of white bread from
a plastic bag lolling open on the top of the fridge. I had the run of the
house for an hour or so before Mary Hanson made it downstairs, if she
did at all before she went out for the evening. Two or so before the kids
got back from school, by which point I would have grabbed more bread
and cheese, more beer, and be safely ensconced in my room reading.

By that point it was clear to me that Mary Hanson was never out of bed
before mid-afternoon. Even then she spent long hours soaking in the bath
and performing whatever elaborate rituals she undertook in the bedroom
until the early evening festivities began. It was Agnes who got the
children up, dressed them, took them to school, cleaned up, did the
shopping.

There were three children in the house at that time. Three of the
surviving children it’s probably better to say, Robert Hanson was the
biological father to two of them, David and Julie Hanson. Exactly who
fathered Jessica is, I believe still unknown. One of the many men who
passed through the house, one of Mary Hanson’s clients perhaps. Robert
Hanson had fathered and murdered three other children over the years, it
seems, along with their mothers in a near thirty year career that
stretched back to his early teens.
Those children. I hardly noticed them during the first and what I
imagined was to be my only week at the house. They left early in the
morning, came home in afternoon when I was already hiding away, ate
and were sent to their rooms. When I did see them skulking around in
the hall, or sitting solemnly in the living room waiting for Agnes I was
struck by how old they looked. The boy was a mini-version of Robert
Hanson, all jaw and pinched forehead, the girl sallow and half melted.
They looked like what they were, children born into poverty and abuse,
the result of generations of bad diet and meaningless toil,
undernourished, weather beaten, calloused outside and in from rubbing
up against the narrow confines of their world. It was in the grain of their
skin, the deadness of their eyes. Children still, yet already they knew the
worst of it. Perhaps that old saying is wrong. Perhaps hope does die first.

That night I waited till Mary Hanson had gone out and came cautiously
downstairs to use the phone in the hall. I had Nick’s number on a piece of
creased notepaper that shook slightly in my hand as I dialed. I was
already anticipating Saturday night in Ipswich, drinking in some student
bar with music on the jukebox and familiar people around me,
recounting it all as Nick laughed along. By then it would all just have
been some audacious adventure.

I pressed the last of the white square buttons on the telephone and waited
with a smile playing over my lips as the number clicked through then
tripped into the long spiked tone for a non-existent number. I must have
misdialed. I tried again, concentrating hard. A series of clicks and again
the long, questioning tone.
He’d written it down wrongly. It didn’t matter, as I remembered that on
a separate occasion, a few weeks before I’d left, when I was practically
living at his place anyway, he had scribbled it on the inside cover of a
copy of “Eros and Civilization”. I went all the way back upstairs to get it,
came all the way back down and compared the two in the hall’s dusty
light, sweating slightly with the exertion. There was one number
difference between the two. Ok, a mistake. I dialed again.

Nothing.

I put the receiver back and sat there looking from one number to the
other. Perhaps he’d changed numbers in the last few weeks. I could try
directory enquiries. Nelson, Ipswich. I didn’t have an address. There was
one different digit in each of the two numbers he’d given me. Some
combination of the two may be the right one. I scribbled the amended
number on the inside cover of the book and then dialed it. This time it
rang, four, five times.

“ Hello.”

Nick. I squeezed my eyes closed, my throat burning sourly, all the fumes
at the back of my eyes.

“ Hello.”
I hung up and stayed slumped there on the bottom step for a while. Then
I went to the kitchen and found some vodka, my footsteps unsteady,
listing to one side.
I had run out of money even before arriving at the Hanson’s. The house
was awash with the stuff, bundles of notes stuffed in jars, in draws and
cupboards, even in the fridge, but I didn’t dare touch any of it and had
taken to rooting down the back of the chairs and sofas in the living room
when the house was quiet, dredging up coppers and the occasional ten
pence piece, taking fifteen, twenty pence a time of the change from the
day’s shopping that Agnes left on top of the fridge. By the Friday I had
built up almost one pound fifty, more than enough to get me to the DSS
and back. I had decided to leave everything in the house just in case
something went wrong and I had to stay over the weekend. I had yet to
be called for an interview but hoped that if I could impress on them the
urgency with which I needed the money they would give me something
to tide me over until my first appointment, by which time I would be
long gone.

The emergency payment office, just a few streets away from the Job
Centre where I had made my claim, was busy even at that time in the
morning, and I stood dutifully in line, behind a stooped old man who
stunk of long years of illness, in front of a teenage girl with bad skin and a
sallow, unnaturally quiet baby. Polar ends of the same, endless process,
me in the middle. The staff were protected from us by thick windows
fitted with greasy, perforated receiver, and when it came to my turn I
noticed that someone had already spat at the fat, bespectacled woman
who spent her days behind it. I put on my politest tone. I seem to have
found myself in a bit of a difficult position, I began. I had been here
before, I knew that they often opened up if they thought you were
educated, well spoken, a cut above the scum they had to deal with
everyday, scum who spat at them, whose demanding, useless faces kept
turning up to cadge yet more money of the State. She sat staring at me
impassively through her bifocals as I gave her my sob story, noted down
my details and told me I would have to wait.

I had brought a book with me, of course, and so I sat on one of the orange
plastic seats they had bolted to the floor in the waiting area, while a filthy
toddler crawled all over my boots and pulled at my trouser legs, the
mother sitting obliviously snapping gum directly opposite me, her head
whipping round to look at the clock every thirty seconds or so in a flurry
of impatient sighing and shifting. I found it hard to concentrate on what I
was reading with the child, the general edginess of the place, my own
anxiety about the money and I scanned the same lines over and over
until, miraculously, my name was called and I went to the collection
window as instructed to be given a Giro for thirty pounds, as much as I’d
dared to ask for. Thirty pounds! I would get out of here, go home
immediately. I had enough for the train back up North. It wasn’t even 11
O’clock yet and I could easily get back to collect my bag, steal a bottle of
something or other for the journey and be on my way before Mary
Hanson had even woken up.

On the bus back to Angel Road I dreamed extravagant dreams of success,

how I would return home for a few months, let my parents feed and
shelter me for as long as it took for me to write something. I would write
a novel, I would really start it now, I would have time to devote myself to
it. I would become famous and admired. I would live in the high style,
surrounded by intelligent, successful people, women would throw
themselves at me. I would finally have attained that solidity, that
completeness that recognition brings. My existence will be registered,
everything will come together. Life begins now and all of this, everything
up to now, with all its failures and its hiding away has simply been a
preparation, not my life itself but the mere prelude to my life. There it
was. I really believed it. Even the smallest triumph, the smallest exertion
of my will, the most minute engagement with things that went in my
favour set off exorbitant dreams, as though it were a small step from
getting out of bed early enough to get to the DSS to conquering the
world.

On that bus ride back through Castleford, the future stretched out before
me, a great white plain on which I could build any kind of life I chose. I
would make films too, soon enough. Once I had written a few brilliant
novels I could move on to adapting them for the screen and then end up
directing myself. I began to imagine the films I would make, something
of both biting social relevance and great formal and imaginative flair that
would seduce not only the underground but also the mainstream. I had
read some books of film theory and felt I knew more than enough about
the grammar of the medium to create a masterpiece. In my head on those
long nights lying beside Rachael I had created many, shot by shot, down
to the sharpest detail. I had so much in reserve it was only a question of
tapping it, of allowing it all to flow dazzlingly forth. Yes, yes, my pulse
was ticking crazily in my wrist. After the first, small-scale cult success I
would be given increasingly larger budgets, live in California but
maintain my stark European sense of things, the perfect synthesis of
artistic outsider and mainstream success. There would be even more
women then, of course, and respect, authority. I would have such
authority precisely because of where I had come from, what I had
struggled through, people would defer to my broader, more bitter
experience of life and at some acceptance speech somewhere I would
mention precisely this moment as the turning point when my life spun
on it’s axis, away from the cold, endlessly collapsing world of doubt and
fear toward the warm world of confidence, effort and success. I would
show great magnanimity to those who had lacked faith in me, to Rachael,
to Nick. Everyone would be absolved by the rightness of my assent, all
that seeming chaos woven into sense. And all this would come to pass
now I had been given thirty pounds from Castleford DSS.

I was so drowned in fantasy as I headed down Angel Road that at first I

didn’t even register the van parked outside the house and it was only
when I saw the door open and the boxes piled up on the steps that I was
shocked out of it. I hesitated before I went in. It seemed that Billy or
Charlie was here, but it was early for both of them. I entered cautiously
and could hear male voices talking in the living room. I needed to get
upstairs, get my stuff and get out. Perhaps I could manage it all while
they were still in there, in and out quickly and silently, like a ghost. I
went up the stairs as stealthily as I could, noticing with a cold thump that
the door on the second floor was open. Mary Hanson’s secret domain. I
continued up to the second floor. My bag was there, everything stuffed
into it.

And there, momentarily, I ran out of steam, imagining coming back

down and being caught with my bag on my shoulder. It would be obvious
that I was trying to sneak away without saying anything. Not that I felt
any obligation or debt to the Hansons but I didn’t want to be revealed to
myself in the light of their cold, contemptuous glares for what I was, a
coward, a sneak, someone who didn’t have the guts to face them.
They would probably go out again at some point and I could leave then,
but that might be hours. Besides, they had the van to unload. I had to do
it now, while the opportunity presented itself. I picked up the bag and
slung it over my shoulder, not bothering to check whether I was leaving
anything behind. I didn’t have anything of value. I didn’t own anything
that couldn’t be replaced.

Down to the second floor, my ears locked on the sound of people moving
about in the kitchen, three or four people, including Mary Hanson,
rattling pots and coughing, the indistinct rumble of conversation, the
smell of cigarette smoke. Down to the first floor and the open front door
just a few feet away, the plane of sunlight against the wall. Someone
might be outside, unloading the van. I held my breath as I came out
through the doorway and into the day. No-one at all, the street
completely empty, the boxes just as they had been on the step. I went
quickly along to the gate, the whole house shrieking silently away at my
back, turned left onto the pavement so sharply I grazed my hip on the
concrete gate post then set off almost at a jog, desperate to put as much
distance between me and number Fifty as I could. Rounding the first
corner I eased off a little as the level of tension dropped. No-one coming
out of the house could spot me scurrying away now. I went past the
nearest bus stop a few streets away and headed for the next, tucked away
in yet another street full of big dilapidated houses that was much less
likely to have any of the Hanson’s retinue driving past. I congratulated
myself on my ingenuity. I could cash the giro at the main post office in
town then hit the station. The bus arrived within two minutes of me
getting to the stop and once I was on it, ticket in hand and we were
pulling away I leant my head against the window and closed my eyes,
saying goodbye now and forever to that house, this town, to the life I had
somehow not been able to fight my way out of.
On the pavement outside the central post office I went through my bag
again and again, through all my pockets. My one piece of identification,
my passport, was gone. I remembered putting it into my bag, scooping it
up among all my things as Rachael stood looking angry and panicked in
the doorway. I’d had it, had never taken it out of my bag, and now it was
not there. I went through everything again, pointlessly, desperately, the
dread mounting, the giro flapping uselessly between my teeth. Then I sat
down on the pavement and felt tears of frustration and anger come
welling up in my eyes. The kids must have come into my room, rooted
through my things, taken it to play with, or out of boredom or spite.

I went into the post office and stood fidgeting in the queue, scanning the
faces behind the counter, willing fate to give me the sympathetic looking
middle aged women at window number three. Instead I got the tired
looking man with grey hair and a double chin next to her.

“Ok.” I began, then paused looking for the right words. He had the
impassive gaze of someone who has heard every possible excuse, every
tall story, every variety of emotional appeal and found himself proof
against them. I sighed and nodded trying to convey to him that I
understood his skepticism but that this really was a special and legitimate
case. “ I have no form of identification whatsoever. I’ve come down here
to cash this emergency payment thinking my passport was in my bag. It’s
not and I don’t have any other way of proving my identity.”
He was playing with a small stack of pound coins with his right hand.
“I’m afraid we can’t cash anything without identification,” he replied, his
voice deliberately robotic, his face mockingly inexpressive, the thinnest
hint of weary irony in it. Here we are again.

“So, if someone finds himself in this situation, of having no method of

identification, with an emergency payment, something that he clearly
needs, desperately, to secure, what can he do?” I kept my voice soft and
questioning, hoping to gently turn him around.

He continued to play with the stack of coins, cutting them in half and
stacking them again first to the right, then to the left. “At risk of
repeating myself,” he said and then I knew immediately that I wasn’t
going to get it. He was a man who considered himself a cut above, fallen
on hard times and reduced to post office work, a man who knew the rules
and loved them for the way they could be used to blandly meet out
brutality, a man who prided himself on his inability to dream, a man for
whom all manifestations of authority, all its restrictions and demands
were instantaneously axioms. The worst of England.

“…. we are not at liberty to cash anything without identification.” He

feigned detachment, boredom, but there was a tremor of suppressed
pleasure at the side of his lip as he inclined his head to one side and
looked at me with a slightly quizzical air. This was the moment he lived
for, when a person broke, when they screamed in anger or crumpled.

“What’s the likelihood that I’m not genuinely entitled to this money?” I
asked him, “That I’m in some way defrauding the taxpayer out of thirty
pounds. It’s only thirty pounds, it’s an emergency payment. Without this,
I have no way of eating tonight, or tomorrow, or until I can find some
adequate means of identification. Clearly if I am a legitimate claimant this
thirty pounds is vital to me, whereas if I’m not the sum of money itself is
so negligible in the grand scheme of things that surely the benefit to me
outweighs the damage…”

I don’t know why I said it. I should simply have left immediately, gone
and begged on the street, taken the train without any money and got as
far away as I could, anything but waste my time providing him with yet
one more opportunity. Despite the fact he had made a show of not
listening to me by gazing down distractedly at his hand as I spoke I could
see that he was trying to control his breathing, a slight flush of
excitement creeping up under his tightly buttoned collar. Pure
bureaucrat, sexually aroused by the idea of saying no.

“At risk of repeating myself,” he said again, given each word a pointedly
weary air. He loved that phrase, it’s aloof edge. I smiled to myself, anger
and desperation breaking behind my eyes. “ we don’t….”

I swallowed everything up, all my rage, all my fear, all my hatred. “Ok,
well. Thank you very much,” I said, and smiled broadly and sincerely at
him. For a moment I was amused, a kind of giddy euphoria, the edge of
hysteria. Nor do I know precisely why I did what I did next. “ Is there
any way I can leave my bag here while I go and try to find my passport?”
I asked him. Somehow, madly, I had to prove him wrong, against all
rational instincts of self-preservation. He was reality itself, this
anonymous insignificant man whose face I can barely recall today and I
would not give into its malevolent impersonality. “ I don’t want to have
to lug it all the way back with me,” I explained.
He was about to offer me another pat, thrillingly officious refusal along
the lines of “regulations prevent me from…” when the sympathetic
woman, customerless now, intervened on my behalf. “We’ll put it behind
the counter for you love, if you like,” she said. The man turned to look at
her. “Alright, I’LL put it behind the counter for you love” she said,
glancing up from the piles of paper she was stamping.

“ If you’re not back by the time we close we shall have no choice but to
leave it outside the front of the shop,” the man told me. I ignored him.

“Thank you very much,” I said to the women. “Alright love,” she said,
back busy stamping again.

Out on the street I saw what I had condemned myself to, a return to the
Hanson’s. I had just enough to get there and back to the centre on the
bus. Here again my life turned on a moment, all kinds of possible futures
crowded in upon me and I chose the worst one of all. I could phone my
parents or my sister, ask for their help. My sister wasn’t far away, in
York, she would drive through and pick me up. She wouldn’t judge me,
she would just want to help me, but I found the idea of her help
infuriating, her concern maddening. You can not want to live because
others want you to, no matter how sincere they are.

Perhaps this is why I set off back to the bus stop instead of picking up the
phone. Again and again over the next months I would find myself
confronted with the possibility of fleeing, with the opportunity to leave.
In fact it was ever-present. I was free after all in some purely abstract
sense and yet really I had no more control over the direction my life took
than if I had been chained to a rock and dropped into the sea. Perhaps I
simply couldn’t imagine life outside a given reality, a reality I despised
yet which I clung to. In poverty and abjection there is an odd sense of
luxury, an odd sense of election. I was on a particular trajectory and it
was out of my hands. A deep fatalism took hold of me, a dimming away
of the edges of my vision. If the smallest victory seemed to open up the
universe to me, the smallest impediment condemned me.

On the bus back I felt as though something inside my chest were eating
at me and as I came into Angel road on foot my mind was so darkly
clouded I had no access to it. I understood the expression, “to be beside
yourself” thoroughly then. Something else was driving me on and I
bobbed uselessly in my own slipstream.

The van was gone now but the front door was still open and I went
straight upstairs, making no attempt to disguise the noise. In the bedroom
I threw back the bed covers and searched the floor, checked the top of
the wardrobe, searched under the rug. I had left my notebook under the
bed. I flipped through it to see if my passport had somehow got jammed
inside. Nothing. I stamped across the landing to the kid’s rooms and
jiggled the door handle. Locked.

Where the fuck was my passport? I could hear voices drifting up from the
living room (6) and the muscles in my arms were trembling as I came
back downstairs to demand that Mary Hanson unlock the rooms and let
me in to search them.
She was slumped at the table smoking, her hair scraped back in a
ponytail. Beside her was a man it took me several seconds to recognize.

Robert Hanson was home early

“You looking for this?” He asked me. He held up the passport that had
been sitting next to him on the table beside the polaroid photograph that
Mary Hanson had taken the week before. He stood up, pushing the chair
violently back behind him, came round the edge of the table toward me,
shouting. “You stay in my house, you eat my food, you steal my fucking
booze, you fuck my missus and then you think you can just fuck off, do
you?”

Then he punched me in the face.

That single punch shattered me.

A second later I was down on the floor and he was standing over me. He
wasn’t a big man but with that punch he dominated me completely.

The moments immediately afterward have been erased from my mind,

certainly I must have got back to my feet again, but what I thought or
said, what I felt is gone. I was in a completely new situation with no set
of adequate responses. I simply didn’t know yet how to act, had never
learned. For a few moments, perhaps a few minutes, I was between
selves. Or perhaps, like a kaleidoscope shaken and waiting to settle, all
the different selves that were in me were in disarray.

At some point early evening I found myself in my room again, sitting on

the end of the bed and staring at my hands. Everything I owned, if the
man in the post office had been true to his word, was now sitting in the
shop doorway in the center of town. My thoughts would not cohere and
drifted around, I pressed the back of my hand to my swollen face. The
light slowly died in the mean little window and at some point I crawled
into bed, listening to the noise build downstairs. It was only then that the
anger came, the anger and shame and I began to shake, my hands and my
long thin forearms dancing on the bedclothes as my eyes filled with tears.
Pathetically, even more shamefully, I wanted my mother. I even
mouthed the word brokenly there in the dark hearing raucous laughter
billowing up from downstairs. Mummy. Mummy. A big boy hit me.

I rolled over on my side. What must it be like to have received a

lifetime’s worth of beatings, of punches and kicks, to inhabit a world
where violence was meted out routinely from day one? I’d seen it all
before of course, in pubs and clubs at home, on Saturday night outside
chip shops, at bus stops, fights over nothing, stamping and kicking, small
town sport. But this was the first time I had ever been a victim. I had
been careful where I went, who I looked at, how I got home. Now I was
trapped in a house with exactly the men I most feared, and they were
angry with me.

Robert Hanson had made it explicit that I owed him, for food and
lodging, for booze, for entertainment and that I would be expected to pay
my dues. I was to be an indentured servant. I would work to pay my bed
and board and also my arrears, but who knew at what point the debt
incurred by fucking someone’s wife was paid off fully? Robert Hanson
had told me in no uncertain terms that he knew everything about me. He
knew where my parents lived, supplied their address to me and said he
would have no hesitation driving up there and demanding restitution in
full from them should I decide to try and get away and wouldn’t my
parents like to know what a dirty little bastard their son was, fucking a
decent married woman and stealing people’s booze. Then he would track
me down. He boasted that he knew people in the police force in every
county in England. He implied that other people who had crossed him
had been killed. He told me that I had better fuck off out of his sight until
he needed me and I had slunk obediently upstairs to cry and dab at my
damaged face.

Two strips of skin were hanging down from the underside of my top lip
where my front teeth had gouged into it. Wincing I pulled them loose
and flicked them away onto the floor. I could feel my face ballooning,
taste blood in the back of my throat. Tentatively investigating the two
wounds in my lip with tip of my tongue I retreated quickly again they
stung so badly from even the lightest touch. My head swam. I was also
desperately hungry, not having eaten all day, and I drifted off into
something more akin to a state of delirium than sleep. I came out of it a
few hours later, feverish in the early morning light, and lay watching the
dust motes swirling through the pale plane of light angling in from the
window.

At first I didn’t realise what had woken me and it was five minutes or so
until I heard it again, a muffled cry of pain, then the low thrum of excited
voices followed by another damp shriek from the floor below. A
rhythmic thumping broke out, the sound of a bed head hitting a wall,
more rapid voices. Mary and Robert Hanson having sex.

I lay listening for while. The sleep had killed off my hunger to a degree
but slowly it returned and my stomach started growling, contracting
painfully. I poked experimentally at my own face and felt nothing, closed
my eyes and saw the same white specks dancing now against the back of
my eyes. The noises kept coming up through the floor and I wished they
would just get it over and done with, go to sleep so I could go downstairs
and steal some bread. As I lay there I realised that there was a third party
in the room with them. I could distinguish both Mary and Robert
Hanson’s voices and often she was still speaking when the moans and
grunts that I had assumed were coming from her were made. Not only
that, but they were growing louder and longer as were the dull, repetitive
sounds of impact.

I got gingerly out of bed and went to the door, pressed my ear against it,
then creaked it open, paused in the doorway, decided to go to the
bathroom. Stepping out onto the landing, there was the boy standing at
the top of the stairs listening, his head to one side, his face expressionless.
We looked at each other, the sound drifting up from the second floor. He
too had been drawn out by it. His door was ajar and I could see the
riotous disorder of the room beyond. He must have been thirteen or so at
that point but he was physically small and malnourished looking, his eyes
were hatched at the edges and the first thin strands of a moustache were
sprouting through the cold wax max of his face. He gazed at me for a few
moments, the two of us recessed in a dark alcove where the light filtering
in from the windows didn’t reach. After a few moments of regarding me
impassively he turned away and went back to bed.

On a strange impulse I took his place at the top of the stairs and paused
there. Then I went down a few steps and paused again, squatted down.
The door to the second floor was directly in front of me. What was
behind that door?

I knew what was beyond it. Violence.

From the moment Robert Hanson returned everything in the house

tightened up and vibrated at a pitch close to hysteria. He was constantly
furious, always a step away from lashing out, permanently issuing
demands.

My life became even more sharply defined by fear now. What I said or
did not say, my choice of words, how I moved, where I looked, the
expression on my face. Everything was dictated by my fear, and as my
behaviour began to be controlled from without so I began to be changed
within. They say there is some inviolable citadel deep within us that can
never be fully taken, some reserve of identity into which we retreat and
lock ourselves securely away, some spark of independent will that can
never be snuffed out. I believed I had that too, some precious vial that the
most distilled essence of my self was concentrated in, but under pressure
of violence it shattered and anything that it contained was scattered.
Some filament, delicate but necessary to maintain me had snapped. I was
disconnected. I had imagined that I was capable of staring into the
darkness, that I was fearless, but it took almost nothing to traumatize me.

My work continued as it had before. I either went with Charlie to lug

boxes out of the back of the van on his deliveries or I stayed in the house
and moved boxes in and out of the garage and around the house, or both.
I started work early in the morning and finished when the work was
done. Long days of drudgery, of the type I had become used to.
Hypothetically I was at liberty to take anything I wanted from among the
unappetizing provisions at number Fifty, but hardly dared to eat anything
at all. I imagined that every mouthful I took, every last slice of bread,
bowl of cornflakes, would be noted and marked down, would prolong my
stay. The more I worked and the less I consumed the sooner I would be
free, but my freedom or otherwise was of course down to Robert
Hanson’s caprice, my usefulness. I was indentured. My will was broken
and my fear and my poor health pushed me further under

If I was sparing with the food I allowed myself I simply couldn’t be with
drink. Every day I drank myself into a stupor until the small hours of the
morning, drinking as much as I could, as quickly as possible as soon as my
work was done to try and bypass the early stages, the euphoria, the way
the imagination swims loose with the first few sips. Instead I wanted to
hurl myself, body and soul into that dead, insensate zone on the other
side of life and to hold myself there with more and more swigs of vodka
or whiskey. Most nights I drank a bottle, lying on the bed, eyes
swimming over the unrelieved dull whiteness of the ceiling a few inches
above me, my mind little more than a few bubbles and slicks, a few scraps
and patches rolling just below the surface of the deep, stagnant well of
my being as Robert Hanson went raging through the rooms below. I slept
for a few hours, usually in my clothes, then went to work again,
abysmally hung over or still drunk, never really awake, neither alive nor
dead.

During the nights the house was less busy, but in no ways quieter. If
Robert Hanson’s return put a halt to some of Mary’s parties, they rowed
so violently as they stamped from floor to floor, at such a pitch and so
tirelessly that the house was in some ways noisier than before. During the
day there was a constant stream of people and goods in and out. I got an
idea of something of the scale of Robert Hanson’s enterprise and thought
that his boast to have contacts in the police was not unfounded. Nothing
on this scale could have operated without their knowledge, without their
collusion. More than ever I tried to be unobtrusive, working silently
besides Charlie or Billy, minimal eye contact, doing exactly as I was told.
Keeping out of everyone’s way but making sure I was always available. If
the days before had been distinct, if they individually stand out in my
memory the weeks, the months that followed Robert Hanson’s return
have disappeared.
In many ways I simply ceased to exist. My books were gone, all my
clothes lost. I had no possibility of escape, or so I believed at that stage. I
had only what I was wearing, everything else having been dumped out
on the streets of Castleford. As such I was required to wear clothes that
were given to me, a pair of jeans that were too short in the leg, too big
round the waist, t-shirts and underpants, all of which had belonged to
one of Mary Hanson’s numerous cousins who had been tall. This was
perhaps the final stage of my submergence. Initially, I resisted. Trying on
the clothes that had generously been provided me for the first time, tears
came up in my eyes. I felt absurd, humiliated, imprisoned by them, but
had no choice but to wear them unless I was simply never going to wash
the few clothes that I could call my own. For a week or so I resisted until
everything was rigid with sweat and dirt and my legs were constantly
itching, then finally I succumbed to the bundle of clothes at the foot of
the bed.

I told myself that I would wear them as a stop-gap, in the interim when
my other clothes were being washed. They felt like another persons skin
laid over me. This is what you are now, this is what you are now, a voice
said over and over again to me in the growing dark. I went to look at
myself in the bathroom mirror, wearing a checked shirt and a pair of
stonewashed jeans that I had gathered in around my hips with my belt. I
had noticed over the past few weeks that my hair was thinning out at the
sides, clumps coming loose and floating to the floor when I let it out of
my pony tail, and I immediately decided to cut all my hair off. I went
downstairs and found a pair of gummed up scissors in the kitchen
drawers, trudged back up to the bathroom, gathered it all up in a pony
tail on the top of my head and then hacked through it.

It fell forward around my face and I began to snip it away at the sides and
the back, cutting it all as close to my skull as I could manage. I took some
disposable razors that had been sitting rusting on the edge of the bath,
soaped up my head and proceeded to messily shave my skull. After an
hour or so of scraping and nicking I was almost completely bald. I looked
at myself again in the frosted mirror and found a stranger looking back at
me. There was a spume of blood and foam on my raw scalp, blinking back
tears, face dripping. Freshly emerged from some amniotic sack.

Who are you? I asked him. I had lost weight. I stepped back to see myself
as fully as I could. My flesh was grey. The self I had been so determined
not to loose, that I had tried to hold away from life and protect; finally I
was colluding in its destruction. Perhaps there was still some minimal
kind of gap through which I might have reclaimed myself, but what
happened next welded me to my seat, to the particular path I had to take.
One night, somewhere in that long summer’s slow, collapsing drift I was
pulled out of my room by one of the boys and told I had to accompany
the entire group, including Robert Hanson himself, on some undisclosed
mission. I came downstairs and was greeted by ten or so men standing at
the foot of the stairs, many of whom I had seen coming in and out of the
house, a couple more I recognized from the night, seemingly years
before, when I had first met Robert Hanson in the Forded Man and he
had shaken my hand.

They nodded at me in greeting as I came down among them. With my

newly shaven head, in my new clothes I experienced a strange kind of
thrill: acceptance. Superficially at least I was like these men now and if I
was careful how I spoke, how I positioned myself, some kind of life
among them may become possible. A narrow life, hedged in on all sides,
but life. Where else had I imagined I would live anyway?
Handshakes were exchanged and I was pleased by how calloused my own
hands were now. Cigarettes were stubbed out, tumblers of whisky flashed
in the hall’s dim light. Thick fingers with signet rings, raw faces
hammered out of shape by the years, the smell of aftershave. Billy was
standing out in the front garden, jogging on the spot and limbering up. A
fight was scheduled.

I assumed it would take place in a pub back garden, perhaps on a

discarded lot, some dark field somewhere outside town. Instead we piled
into the small armada of cars and vans parked up in front of the house
and drove out to an empty car park. I was in the back of Charlie’s van,
crouching among the boxes with another couple of young underlings,
swilling beer from cans and smoking. We exchanged a few words, I never
saw either them again. I was drinking from a bottle of vodka and with
every jolt of the van’s back axel on the road I felt it eating away at my
chest.

After twenty minutes or so we were there. There was an HGV parked up

beside a chain-link fence with its back doors open. Sodium lights, a
cluster of warehouses, low corrugated roofs and concrete posts, a group of
men milling around. Pulling myself out of the back of Charlie’s van and
dropping down to the concrete, the tension, the enmity was thick in the
air. I experienced a surge of adrenalin, the thrill of being part of the mob,
being one of the boys. I fought it down. Brusquely offered handshakes
and then a quick retreat between the key members of the respective
gangs as they regrouped around the fighters. (7)

The opposition went in first, their man hoisted up with a roar of approval
before they clambered in after him. We followed, lifting Billy in first just
as they had done, shouting out to him and then scrambling up ourselves,
boosting the man ahead of us in so he could turn and pull us up.

There was a series of silver bulbs, strung across the middle of the ceiling
on a length of looping flex, that gave off a bright, burning white light.
The big doors slammed closed behind us and instantly the heat hit me,
then the smell, a sudden wave of sweat and fear, the high animal stink of
combat. There were sixty or so men in there, roughly divided between us
and them, the Gypsies.

The lorry set off, a hiss of brakes, a sudden lurch and we all shifted back,
reached out to support ourselves, the lights swinging and dragging our
shadows out over the walls. I found myself beside Charlie. Where are we
going now? I asked, I still hadn’t fully grasped that this was where the
fight was to take place. Round and round he said, round the estate.
Usually used for dogfights Charlie told me, in a moment of rare
enthusiasm, taking the bottle from me for a gulp, offering me a cigarette
as the men formed a loosely knit circle and the fight quickly began. Both
fighters had their shirts off. Billy was the shorter and slighter of the two,
the other a thick, barrel-chested man with black hair.

“That’s the bastard,” Charlie said to me, pointing at him, as they began to
circle around each other, jabbing his finger at him over the man in front’s
shoulder. “That’s the bastard, that’s the bastard.”

I had the advantage of being taller than anyone else and there was
nothing I could do but watch. We were at the back of the semi-circle,
three men deep, that had quickly formed and that slowly, liquidly shifted
back and forth as the fighters spun and grappled, already slicked with
sweat, a flushed man in a heavy woolen jumper occasionally prizing them
apart. How long would this take? How many rounds? I asked. No rounds,
no fucking rounds. Knockout. Charlie told me out of the corner of his
mouth, head bobbing and darting to get a glance at the fight as it
progressed.

Suddenly we all crushed back into the corner, then Billy was propelled
toward his opponent again and we surged after him, wheeled around as
one as he came out swinging and the van took a corner, everybody
knocking against each other and tilting forward, beer slopping out of
cans, cigarettes compacting against backs in a small showers of orange
sparks, the sounds of the blows that they rained on each other lost in the
wordless roar of the men, some gutteral, primal language, that came
rearing up in everyone’s throat. I stood there among them, stiff as a pole,
transfixed, until I too began to vibrate at the same frequency and
quiveringly the voice rose up in me too. I felt as though I were drawing it
in from all around me, conducting it. I too began to shout. I too lost
myself and everything suddenly became clearer. I could see the sharp
white scars on the gypsy’s knuckles, smell the fat in the smear of blood
on the far wall of the van with hallucinatory vividness, hear the
individual voices threading into that glorious cacophony, feel the texture
of my own voice within it, an alien voice, the voice of something ancient
and fearful made manifest in me.

The van continued it’s circuit of the industrial estate, we circled the
fighters, they circled each other. Wheels within wheels, the concentric
rings of a whirlpool. We were in a trance of sorts, moving in unison,
darting around the fighters to give them space, pulling each other out of
the way as they jabbed and parried, lunged at each other, came shuffling
and staggering towards us. There was something sublime in it, the way
we moved, one single-minded entity, wheeling like birds in flight,
minutely responsive. Soon any boundary between the two groups was
gone, we were all mixed in together, and when the knockout blow came,
ten sweltering, hoarse, agonizing minutes in, when Billy’s opponent
caught him on the back of his head as he stumbled forward with a blow
so loud it could be heard above the din, we were shoulder to shoulder
with our enemies.

There was a second’s pause as we waited for Billy to get up, though the
sudden shifting among the men, the exhalation of breath, the sense of
rapid deceleration suggested they knew Billy was finished. A pause of
half a second and then the winner was having his arms flung up in the air
by his admirers, his back slapped, his sweat-wet hair ruffled up into a
crown of black spikes as a couple of our men crouched over Billy, rolled
him onto his back, sprinkled water onto his face. His eyes opened, with
help he sat up, his head placed oddly on his neck as though it had been
impacted into his shoulder on one side, his jaw crushed awkwardly
against it, his left eye swimming and unable to focus.

Quite how what happened next started, I don’t know. Later Robert
Hanson claimed he was the catalyst, going in to punch the referee.
Whatever the cause, in a matter of seconds it was madness, everybody
rushing in to help the knot of men that had begun to brawl over on the
far side of the trailer and then being dragged into it themselves. It went
through us like fire. We were combustible. Instinctively I tried to get
away, though there was nowhere to go, pressed myself back against the
wall and began to edge my way toward the doors, imagining somehow
that no-one would notice me. A blow to the side of my head soon set me
reeling and lashing out in panic. I tripped over and was stamped on,
covered my face and crawled on my knees as kicks flailed out at me,
winding me, splitting my knuckles as I held my hands over my face for
protection.

I hit the big double back doors and had nowhere else to go. At some
point the vehicle had come to a halt. Trapped. The next thing I knew,
with a great tilting rush of dark sky and cool air I was tumbling toward
the road as the driver pulled open the doors then went down under a
series of plunging bodies. I rolled over onto the grass verge to avoid the
other men sprawling down onto the road. The side of my face was
scraped raw, dusted with grit.

The two sides began to regroup now, the casualties dragged away
unconscious along the dark road as though they were being pulled out of
a war zone and I scurried along after them. It was breaking up, small
pockets of scuffling being pulled apart, the aggrieved parties being
returned to their respective teams. Charlie (8) was just ahead of me,
limping, Billy carried on the crossed arms of two of the men who had
been in Robert Hanson’s house earlier. His head bouncing, his eyes half
open and only a crescent of white visible in the moonlight as we jogged
away, shouting into mobiles, summoning the cars to come and collect us.

At four o’clock or thereabouts Billy died on the sofa in the living room.

At four fifteen or thereabouts I set out with Robert Hanson to bury him.
We drove out to Turnpike field together, Billy’s body on the back seat,
covered with a blanket. Robert Hanson talked incessantly on the way,
talked about how he’d started the fight in the back of the van clobbering
the referee, all the fights he’d been in, all his victories, intimations about
men that weren’t around anymore, how the tattoos on his forearm
commemorated some of these dark necessities. Many of the fights were
over women and so on to stories of all the women he’d had, of the strange
and surprising requests that he was more than happy to oblige them in, of
Mary Hanson’s insatiability, how he’d had all his wives out on the game.

At this point Turnpike field was just on more slope of dark grass
somewhere outside town. Another winding, overgrown path just big
enough to get the van down, a wooden gate with its rusting hasps and
then that moonlit acre edged with trees. Later of course it would become
a site of intense activity, one of the most extensive forensic searches ever
undertaken and Billy would be among the first to be unearthed, still more
or less intact after only four months in the ground. It was hampered by
the bitter Winter that was just begging to sink its teeth in, mid-
November, when the search began, a search that dragged on through
Christmas and into the New Year and which revealed something of the
extent of Robert Hanson’s crimes.

The boot was opened and the shovels removed, the half rotten old gate
clambered over. Silently, we set to digging a grave on the south side of
the field, partly hidden by the long dragging branches of a yew tree. We
went down deep, Robert Hanson grunting and muttering, heaving up
rectangular clods of earth that shone wetly in the moonlight. To the clay
he shall return.

As we went back for the body already the sky was lightening, the moon a
pale watermark, birdsong rising from the hedgerows. My drunkenness
had evaporated and a little bile rose in my throat as we dragged him first
out onto the floor and then stooped to pick him up. I had his feet, thin
wrists against his thin ankles. Robert Hanson took him under the
shoulders.

We lay him down beside the grave (9) and Robert Hanson pushed him in
with his foot. He seemed to fall for a long time, his arms rising up, his
head lolling. Then, quickly, we shovelled the earth back on him, tamped
it down and stood hunched for a moment getting our breath back.

The sun almost up now. Another beautiful day. That must have been one
of the best summers in living memory. Robert Hanson was hot. He pulled
of his t-shirt and stood there sweating and squinting into the day. He was
breathing heavily.

“Take your T-shirt off,” he said. It sounded like a challenge. Or a dare.

“ I’m alright,” I told him.

He stared at me for a few moments, sticking his big jaw out. Those quick,
angry, stupid little eyes.

“Well then,” he said, glancing around. “Let’s fuck of home then.”

We drove back in silence, Robert Hanson brooding, hunched into himself
at the wheel (10).

“We’re fucked now,” Charlie declared to us as we came in, chewing away

at a cigarette. It was already hot and the kitchen stank.

I went straight to the fridge, got a two litre bottle of coke out and drank
as much of it as I could get down, my eyes closed, small nicks of light
against the darkness. Dead tired. I needed to lie down, started heading
upstairs.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Charlie asked.

I stood nonplussed in the doorway. “We’re already fucking late getting

off. Who’s going to shift all the gear about now? You?” he asked, jabbing
a cigarette at Robert Hanson.

“I fucking will,” Robert Hanson told him.

“Fuck off. You will fuck as like. You’ll sort out money that’s owed us will
you, you’ll sort out the cunts that won’t pay up, will you? You?”

“I’ll sort any fucker out.”

Charlie sat glaring at him. His voice went deeper.

“I fucking told you not to sort that fight out. He weren’t ready. He
weren’t fucking ready.” He pushed the chair out behind him and rose
grimacing his hand pressed into the small of his back.

“Just keep out of my fucking way,” he told Robert Hanson pushing past
him.

We were clearly going out to do the day’s deliveries.

“Back’s fucked!” he shouted into the damp hallway. Then, “don’t make
me fucking turn round.” After a second I realised this was addressed to
me and I scurried after him. Robert Hanson had gone out into the garden
to smoke and scowl. A family feud. (11)

“Here’s keys,” Charlie said fumbling them up out of his pockets. “Upstairs
door. There’s a load of boxes in the bar.”

I took them. For the first time I was going to pass beyond the padlocked
door on the second floor.

I had explored it in my imagination lying in bed in the room above,

listening to the noise (12), but it wasn’t how I had pictured it. If the rest
of the house had gone undecorated in the fifteen years since the Hansons
had bought it, this was where they had allowed their tastes to express
themselves.

The corridor was lined with soft-core erotic prints, a series of black and
white shots of gentle bondage and sepia trysts cut from some tasteful
book on the erotic arts and framed. There was a worn down brown shag-
pile carpet on the floor, the walls were painted dark red. I passed a big
bedroom, it’s door agape and the floor littered with clothes and what
looked like pornographic magazines, then on past a second padlocked
door, the steps up to the attic and into the bar.

Much was made of the bar later in all the reports on the house that
appeared in the papers but it was hard for me not to just stand stock still
and laugh. I had imagined a torture chamber, or at least a pleasure
garden. The bar itself was cobbled together out of odds and ends of cheap
wood. There was a stucco arch above it, strung with fairy lights and the
words “Mary’s Place” blu-tacked across it in letters made from card and
covered with gold paper. The walls were covered in mirrors with thick,
plastic frames and with framed photographs of Fifties’ film stars,
Humphrey Bogart, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe along with some
kitsch Eightie’s posters, fluorescent, airbrushed images of women with
electric blue eyeshadow and neon blusher trancing-out to the sounds
pumping in through the sticky looking cables of their walkman
headphones. Yet more fairy lights were strung between them. In one
corner there was a plastic palm tree listing badly to one side. The seating
was a series of shabby looking sofa’s covered in bright cushions. A mirror
ball hung from the ceiling, the dark blue carpet was white with cigarette
ash, the windows permanently shuttered with a blind from which the
metallic paint was peeling. The whole place reeked of smoke and spilled
booze.
There were a dozen or so boxes stacked up against the bar (13) and
leadenly I picked them up, two at a time and took them downstairs to
Charlie who lumbered out to the van with them, cursing and spitting
furiously between his teeth. When the job was done I locked the door
again, clicking the heavy padlock into place. It occurred to me that Agnes
must live in there, in one of the two rooms I had gone past. But as of yet I
had not asked myself where Jessica Hanson lived.
Over the next few weeks the relationship between Charlie and Robert
Hanson declined further. Now that Billy was gone and there was no one
immediately available to take his place, with Charlie’s back still thrown
out after the fight the entire workload devolved onto me, with sporadic
bouts of help from Robert Hanson.

Mid afternoon, returning from the day’s deliveries I ate then set to work
shifting boxes about and setting up the next day’s orders in the living
room. When Charlie returned with the van early evening I loaded it up
according to Charlie’s route plan, the last of the morning’s drop offs in
first. On the worst days there was also a consignment of goods to be
unloaded from the van out to the garage first. This extended my working
day up to late evening. It was a simple system but too neat to believe that
Robert Hanson could have come up with it and on the few occasions
when he did help me, always when Charlie was in the house and within
earshot, he ordered me about, blaming me for the muddle he created or
the stupidity of the system.

When we were alone each took the opportunity to defame the other,
each implied that they were the cornerstone of the business and that the
other rode on their coat tails.

If Charlie tried to appeal to the grafter in me, Robert Hanson tried to

appeal to the pleasure seeker. All Charlie’s tales were about the work he’d
done, the jobs he’d pulled off, the plots and schemes he’d been involved,
the run of bad luck, the incompetence of others that had served to keep
him stuck in Castleford and beholden to people like Robert Hanson.
Charlie would never have had anything to do with him at all if it weren’t
for him and Mary being cousins, if it weren’t for the big house they’d
lucked into that they could store stuff in. He wasn’t right in the head,
spoke contemptuously of Robert Hanson’s pretensions to being a hard
man. Good at slapping around women and kids, not much else, he said.
Charlie spoke wistfully and admiringly of real men he knew who had
pulled off big jobs and retired to Spain or lived the life of Riley outside
the reach of the law (14).

Robert Hanson’s talk on the other hand was all sex, all about the women
he’d had, the women he had on the go at that moment, their insatiability
and his own, the pregnant women who had lured him into her house
when he’d gone round to drop off some booze for a mate and from who’s
tits he’d sucked milk sweet as honey, another who had begged him to
stick a candle up her arse while he was fucking her, a randy young shop
assistant who he’d struck up a conversation with and who had enticed
him round the back of Woolworths in the centre of town for a knee
trembler up against the wall during her dinner break. There was this one
who was only fourteen, this other who might not even have been that.
Others whose age was indeterminate (15).

I listened to both of them impassively. I nodded. I knew I was not

required to do anything other than listen to them rehearse their versions
of themselves, their versions of the world. At that moment I had no
version of either to offer up. The blandness of my response was taken as
approval by both, as it had to be. I could not afford to take sides.

As I was stacking boxes in the van late one afternoon Robert Hanson
returned. Back from the pub. I could tell by the way he got out of the car
“You, I want a word with you,” he told me almost immediately, pushing
silently past Charlie and coming up the drive. I stood motionless for a few
seconds. “Put that in the fucking van then get your arse back in house,”
he said. I went down behind Charlie and loaded it up, then exchanging a
nod with Charlie, I did as he said.

Robert Hanson was swaying in the kitchen taking the top off a bottle of
whiskey. He thrust the bottle at me as I came in. “Have a drink” he said. I
looked around for a glass and found a mug that said Dad on a shelf in the
dusty Welsh dresser. He was eyeing me all the time.

“You a queer?” he asked me. I looked at him. The eternal flies were there
swinging dizzily around between us. I shook my head. “ No.” I could see
him sizing me up. He must have known then that I hadn’t slept with
Mary Hanson. His calculation must have run like this: doesn’t like
women, doesn’t like men, there’s only one thing left for him to like.

“Drink that,” he told me. I gulped it down not knowing where to look as
he continued to stare at me. “ You look like a girl,” he said. “That fucking
long hair. What did you have that for?”

“Just a fashion thing,” I told him.

“Fucking cunt,” he said incredulously. There was a pause. “You never

sucked anyone off?”

“ No.”

“Thought about it though?”

“No”

“ Billy had a big cock.” I shrugged. “ Reckon you could have got your
mouth round that?”

“I’m not gay,” I told him quietly my eyes still down.

“What are you then, what are you?” his words were rapid, summary. He
had already decided what I was.

“ I like girls,” I said.

“Not what I hear. Not what I hear,” he replied even more rapidly his head
angling in toward me, trying to intrude into my field of vision. He poured
more whiskey into the mug, almost filled it. “Drink up. I’m taking piss
out of you. Knock that back. Let’s have a drink. Me and you.”

I swallowed the whiskey and almost brought it instantaneously back up

again. Robert Hanson picked up another bottle from a crate down beside
the fridge and headed unsteadily for the living room. I trooped in behind
him and took my seat. “ I ever told you about that time I was up North,
fucking Scotland?” His top lip peeled back to reveal his big wet yellow
teeth. “ Were this bird at the time, hanging round the clubs, little cracker
she were, a little belter. Red hair. Right nice little figure on her. Anyway
one night I took her back to the lodging and fucked her. It were that Lulu
(16). Do you know her?”
I nodded. “Right.”

“I fucked her. She were mucky. Tie me up she fucking said to me. I tied
her up fucking good and proper.”

“They were fucking all over me them Scottish birds, back then,” he said
and gazed out of the window. Then he started shouting, pushing back in
his chair, his eyes scouring the ceiling “ Agnes! Agnes! Agnes!” until he
heard the upstairs door click. “Get her fucking down here,” he shouted as
her feet came down the stairs stopped and then scurried back up again. A
minute or so later she came timidly in through the doorway with Jessica.

“Alright,” Robert Hanson said and indicated to Agnes that she should
make herself scarce with a swift, sideways jab of his head. Jessica was
wearing a school uniform, though as far as I was aware she never left the
house.

“Come here,” he told her. She hobbled barefoot through the mess and
stood before him. Robert Hanson patted his knees and she clambered up
onto them, sat there side on with her head down, her dirty blond hair
curtaining her face. From where I sat I could see the lice crawling in it.

“Shift round,” he said angrily and pulled her legs forward so she was
forced to straddle him.
The clock on the wall had stopped ticking away the minutes, the dust
motes still in the light breaking through the gap in the curtains, my heart
skipping one beat then another, the clouds caught in the sky, the earth
arrested in it’s orbit, everything turning from it’s path to observe this act.

With a leer Robert Hanson stuck his tongue out. His thick, cracked,
coated tongue and waggled it in front of her upturned face, a long strand
of discoloured spittle curling down off the tip. She craned up and sucked
it, taking as much of it into her mouth as she could manage. Robert
Hanson grunted his approval, his nostrils flaring, his excited breathing
making the cow curl of greasy hair on the top of her head pulse up and
down. Whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, slumped in his
chair as his six year old daughter sucked on his tongue. His party piece.

After a few moments he withdrew it in a small shower of spit that went

down onto her face and that she wiped away with the sleeve of her
jumper.

“ What do you think of that then,” he asked me?

From that day on Robert Hanson and I were constantly in each other’s
thoughts. Wherever I was I could feel that he was thinking about me,
chewing me over, waiting for the right moment.

It took him exactly a week. Late the next Thursday evening as I was
lugging things out of the garage. He was standing in the doorway’s yellow
light, his face slack.

“You good at keeping secrets?” he asked, staring inquisitorially, deciding

that I was, and that anyway I would have to be. His need outweighed his
caution.

We had both known this moment would come. I smiled a deaths-head

smile. This was what my life had been leading too. I was being punished
for having thought I could escape, now I would be dragged into the
lower depths. This was the place reserved for those who refused the
world.

Robert Hanson turned and I followed him into the house, up the stairs,
stood at his back as he unlocked the door. I was already in so deep that
there was no going back. This at least would be a terminus of sorts. We
went down the corridor and up the stairs to the attic, where again we
paused as he unlocked the door. I knew whose room this was, had always
known. It was Jessica Hanson’s.

The room was almost empty. The floorboards were bare. The white paper
on the walls had been clawed off here and there and had been scrawled
on with crayons. In the centre of the floor there was a double mattress.
The covers had been kicked off onto the floor and Jessica Hanson was
sitting in the middle of it, the sheet gathered round her as before, held at
her throat.

“Fuck off, fucking bastard, fucking bastard, fuck off” she began to shout.
She had a black eye.

Robert Hanson took two quick steps forward and slapped her hard
enough to bend her head to the mattress and set her eyes swimming
groggily in her head.

“I’ll fucking break you yet,” he announced with relish, rolling up his shirt
sleeves. He was drunk.

Jessica Hanson had a long cigar-shaped patch of hair missing from the
side of her head, a result of rubbing it repeatedly against the wall. She
looked at me, sticking her jaw out and widening her eyes. She appeared
to be squatting over a large rusty dumb bell. There were several more, of
varying sizes, in the far corner of the room.

“Close fucking door,” Robert Hanson said.

 I closed the door. There was a video camera set up on a tripod to the
right of the bed.

“Welcome to Hollywood,” he said.

He showed me how to use the camera as Jessica Hanson sat with her back
to us. Then he went over and crouched beside her, fumbled up under
the sheet and rolled the dumb bell away. It thudded dumbly against the
skirting board. He took a few strands of her greasy hair in his hand and
inspected them, head to one side.

Then Robert Hanson dragged a large hold all form the corner to the
center of the room and opened it, removed a few implements, inspected
them.

There we were in the light from the bare bulb, silent, motionless, an
innocent enough little tableaux, awaiting some cue from the wings.
Frozen in position for a few moments before suddenly, violently, it (17)
began.

And still this is not the worst of it.

The worst of it was Agnes.
The Friday of the bank holiday weekend in August 1996 I began drinking
as soon as we returned from our deliveries. I sat in the garage drinking
first beer then whiskey, lying on my back until it grew dark. Then I went
into house and upstairs to scribble in my book with a bottle of coke and a
litre of vodka. Around three in the morning, barely able to articulate my
own name I came downstairs for more.
There was noise coming from the back of the house, an indistinct
bumping and subdued grunting from the vicinity of the back door, the
sound of something effortful. I was as drunk as I had ever been and I
waded through the mysterious shifting planes and gravity of the living
room as though the house were being tossed about on the high seas,
kicking up papers and navigating clumsily around ashtrays and empty
bottles. Billy was out there, still humping boxes about at midnight, the
maniac.

I don’t know why I was in the living room, probably it was to scavenge
cigarettes. There was a crash from the kitchen and I froze in place,
imagining Billy in a rage back there, slamming things around. I
experienced it at a great distance my brain struggling to connect the noise
with a likely cause, then realising it was the sound of a door being flung
open. The feet came padding rapidly across the kitchen floor toward the
door, someone drunk, even drunker than I was, unable to control their
direction, crashing into the table and setting the bottles chattering,
hitting the fridge. Who was this drunk at three in the morning? Billy?

But of course. Billy was dead. For a second I imagined that he had come
back. Clawed his way up out of the loosely packed earth beside the
hedge, under the broad, cold moon and stumbled back here to condemn
us.

But it was worse that that, it was Agnes. At first I couldn’t make any
sense of what I was seeing. She was naked, her hands bound behind her
back, a plastic bag plastered to her head and bound around her throat
with a thick halter of black tape, her body covered in bruises. Somehow
the bag had ruptured, there was a ragged hole over her mouth that she
was sucking in air through. I suppose that as she asphyxiated, the bag
pulled further and further into her mouth, her sharp little teeth had
punctured it and she had either chewed a hole in it somehow or the small
rip had opened up under the desperate pressure of suction.

Running blind she hit the big table and caromed off it straight into the
edge of the setee, went face first over the arm into its yielding cushions,
thrashed there trying to get up, all the loosely packed fat on her buttocks
and the back of her thighs dimpling and rolling. Robert Hanson was not
far behind her, his cheeks flushed, the sleeves of his jumper rolled up, his
knuckles raw and lusty.

“Fucking kneel on her!” Robert Hanson shouted at me, his big yellow
teeth slicked with spit. He ducked back out through the living room
door.

Kneel on her? What would happen to me if I did not do as Robert

Hanson commanded. Kneel on her. I shuffled around the end of the sofa
and pressed my hands down on her narrow shoulders. She pulled her
head back and started to shout, perhaps in Polish, perhaps in some other
language, the language of desperation. All that was visible of her face was
the open wound of her mouth, the pink depths of her throat and her
tongue, through the rip in the bag, beyond that the pale folds and
hummocks of her naked body. I went up on tiptoe and brought all my
weight down on her. Just stay there Agnes, stay there, I said, it’s ok, it’s
ok. But Agnes knew what was happening to her, had understood the full,
awful reality of it in a way that I still did not. Stay there, calm down. As
though I were trying to help her. In a second Robert Hanson will be here
and everything will be alright. What did I think? He rapes and tortures
his daughter, but other than that he wouldn’t hurt a fly?

A second later Robert Hanson was there and in his hand he was holding a
hammer.

“Hold her still,” he shouted. “Fucking kneel on her.” Drunkenly I

clambered over the arm and onto Agnes’ back, my boney knees digging
into her ribs, wobbling as she thrashed from side to side.

He came round the side of me and put a deep, moist dent in the black
plastic bag just below the crown of her head.

The noise was terrible. A sharp crack that seemed to sever my arms at the
shoulders, to cut cleanly through something in me, to divide me further
There was a hexagonal impression in the plastic that slowly filled with
blood. He paused over her with the hammer raised. But Agnes had
stopped moving.

“Get her up before she gets blood on sofa,” he said, ever mindful of Mary
Hanson’s domestic concerns. I moved off to one side as Robert Hanson
scrunched up some newspapers and pressed them to the wound. After a
few second they stuck there, a jagged crown of newsprint sprouting from
the hole in her head, before he rolled her off the sofa, stepped over her to
take her feet and began to drag her across the floor.

“Get her hands,” he told me.

I stooped and took up Agnes’ trailing arms at the wrists, so delicate it felt
as though the weight of her body might just drag them loose with a
sudden slippage of muscle and sinew. We shuffled back through the
kitchen into the patio with her, laid her at the top of the cellar steps.
Robert Hanson descended and unlocked the door, then pulled her down
the stairs, her head thudding against the muddy brick, the newspaper
jolting loose, disappearing with her into the darkness. The light came on
briefly, a surge of light up the stairs, the shadows suddenly jumping up
panicked out of the darkness, illuminating the overgrown hedge, the
hand rail, the weeds clawing at the edge of the patio. Then it was
slammed closed again. I went back to the kitchen and took a bottle of
something off the table. Probably vodka.

There was total silence in the living room. Not so much as a whisper, nor
the creak of a saw against bone, the soft hiss of a knife gently puncturing
the surface of the skin, the sudden sluicing of guts and fat into a black
plastic dustbin. After half an hour or so of taking mouthfuls of raw vodka
and smoking dog ends from the ashtrays I passed out. When I came
round a few hours later Robert Hanson was sitting opposite me in his
chair, shirt off, shiny with sweat, drinking a can of beer.

“You’ve got some work to do,” he told me.

For the second time in a month I dug a grave. I went into the far corner
of the garden and set to work. Robert Hanson had told me that it should
be just wide and deep enough to get a dustbin in. I worked silently away,
returning now and then to the house for water and to hear Robert
Hanson snoring in his chair. I asked myself how he could sleep so soon
after having cut up the body, but then I myself had slept within an hour
or so of assisting in the murder.
When I had finished I went back to wake him. I could have killed him
with the shovel I was still holding as he sat slumped in the chair, his shirt
ridden up over his belly and his mouth agape, the teeth knocking against
each other in his shriveled gums.

Instead I said, “It’s done.” Then again, more loudly. Then once again,
shouting. Tears came up in my eyes as though in raising my voice above
the low, robotic monotone I had found myself using some switch was
tripped, some other set of internal co-ordinates threatening to come into
play. He still did not wake up and so I leant forward and shook his
shoulder a few times. He stood up even before he had opened his eyes.
Still asleep, leaping to his feet, his arms swinging around loosely before
his eyelids fluttered open. “Right, right, right, right all right, all fucking
right.” He had no idea where he was, stared at his feet for a second.

“I’ll get her out of cellar, you wait in garden,” he said.

He was down there for a long time as I squatted among the weeds and the
long grass, my eyes closed. Her body was in two thick bin liners which he
brought up one at time, her head in a plastic Morrison’s carrier bag. We
put her torso in first. Her arms and legs were bisected at the knee and
elbow and we slid these in around it. Then her hands and feet went on
the top and finally her head, so that it lay looking up at me. Robert
Hanson lost interest the moment the body was packed away and went
back to the house. I took the bin by the handles and lowered it into the
hole, my legs splayed and shaking, the small of my back taking most of
the strain. Gently I eased her down, then shoveled loose earth in upon
her. One more addition to the Hanson family plot. Agnes’ nineteen
miserable years coming to their end here among the weeds.
Agnes’ murder triggered a fresh round of hostilities between Robert and
Mary Hanson, between Robert Hanson and Charlie.

The source of the problem between husband and wife was obvious.
Where were they going to find another au pair at such short notice? Who
was going to look after the domestic chores? Mary Hanson was furious at
the idea that she would be obliged to take on work that had previously
been delegated to Agnes.

Robert Hanson’s defense was that he’d had no choice. He had intercepted
a letter that contained a coach ticket back to Poland. He waved it in
Mary’s face in the kitchen before throwing it onto the pile of bills and
receipts on top of the fridge, as I stood with a box in my arms waiting to
pass, getting Monday’s delivery together. See, see! He couldn’t afford to
have her wandering about everywhere, shooting her mouth off where he
couldn’t keep an eye on her, could he?
Within a few hours Charlie and Robert Hanson were bellowing at each
other in the living room. Perhaps Mary phoned him, it was certainly
unusual for him to be there on a Sunday. They were going at it as I came
down the stairs from the bathroom. Going into the kitchen their voices
dropped away to nothing. I glanced in through the doorway and they
both nodded at me, mouths open, eyes narrowed. Not long after they
went out together. Clearly they had found something of great mutual
importance to discuss.

I understood that I had to leave.

I understood with absolute clarity as Robert Hanson justified himself to

Mary in the kitchen that I was next, that the only reason he had not
killed me, or arranged for me to be killed yet was that I was useful. I
lugged boxes, I would help him make his movies.

He was a rapist and a murderer. He would kill me. I knew too much
about him. The complicity that was keeping me alive was precisely what
had sealed my fate. I needed to leave as quickly as possible. It occurred to
me that both he and, more dangerously, Charlie would try to hunt me
down and that if I left I had to be sure of a clean break, had to get as far
away as possible.

I still had no money but I would use Agnes’ ticket and take the coach to
Poland. I checked it was still there. There was a seat booked from Leeds
to Warsaw for that Wednesday. Three day’s time.
Would they try to kill me within the next three days? I stood in the
corridor feeling desperation swelling in my chest. Three days was
impossible, the stress of it was unsustainable, knowing that any moment
could be the last, trying to carry on as normal. There was no way I could
do it. My heart was painful against my ribs, as though it were trying to
escape from me.

Then, magically, everything changed. Something fell away from my

eyes. Of course I didn’t need to wait for three days I could leave now if I
chose. So what if I had no money? There were thousands of pounds
secreted all over the house. I would take it and leave. I would get out of
the country.

Where was my passport?

I went into the living room and searched among the drifting papers on
the sideboard. There it was, where Robert Hanson had thrown it a few
months before after knocking me to the ground. I picked it up, opened it
and saw my photograph there, gazing sullenly back. An enormous surge
of panic ran through me. It was simple for me to leave and always had
been. I had been in a kind of trance and had woken up suddenly,
drenched in cold sweat, my hands shaking, as though a deep, enervating
fever had broken. Now every second that I remained in the house seemed
unbearable, seemed to guarantee death.

First I needed money. I opened the sideboard drawers. There were

bundles of twenties in rubber bands. I hesitated for a second, then took
five of them, a few thousand pounds. Suddenly I was rich. I had
everything I needed now except my book.

My first impulse was to leave it and get out of the house immediately.
Nonetheless, I went upstairs for it and as I reached the bedroom I heard
car doors slamming in the street.

They hadn’t gone anywhere, simply out to the car to talk in private. They
didn’t want to have me out of reach. If I was trapped in the house with
them now and they saw that the money was missing they would know I
had tried to escape. Then they would kill me immediately. I needed to
put it back. Typically, I hesitated too long in the bedroom, my mind
white with panic, heard them coming into the house and slamming the
door closed behind them.

There was a pause then, “Where the fuck are you?” Charlie shouted up

the stairs.

I had no choice but to respond.

“Here.”
I spent that night on the street in Leeds. I went back to where we had
lived together, Rachael and I, in the two up two down behind the Royal
Park pub. The bedroom light was still on when I got there, two o’clock or
so, but drunk as I was I didn’t have the courage to knock on the door. I
squatted down at the end of the road smoking and drinking until the
light went out, then I went back to the centre of town and waited in the
bus station. Twenty seven hours later I was in Prague.

I phoned my mum and dad from the lobby of a youth hostel. My father
was too angry to speak to me, my mother cried.

“Carl, Carl. Where have you been?” she asked me.

I rested my head against the wall of the telephone booth.

“Lost,” I told her.

Notes
I have decided to use a separate series of notes for two reasons. Firsty, in
order to offer background information on the case. All of this information
is available elsewhere and will be widely known not only by those who
have taken an interest in the case, but by the public at large, given the
enormous interest in Angel road and the Hanson’s catalogue of crimes
that was generated by the intense media focus on the case. In many
respects then, the reader is likely to be more informed with regard to the
biographies of the key players than the writer.

Secondly, because much of the first hand experience will be so disturbing

that I feel it’s only right to keep it away from the main body of the text,
thereby allowing the reader the option of avoiding anything too
distressing.

1) I would meet many of the men clustered in the beer garden that
evening again some three months later, when the second round of the
ongoing feud between the Hanson’s large, loosely affiliated clan and the
group of Gypsies who had taken up semi-permanent residence in the
ruins of one of the old storage depots on the outskirts of town. Setting up
bare knuckle fights was just one of the Hanson’s sidelines. Like any
successful business they had diversified over the years augmenting the
shoplifting, smuggling, extortion, robbery and prostitution with
pornography and gambling. They organized fortnightly dogfights for
example in the back off an old customized HGV that was driven around
the outskirts of Castleford for a few hours while the fights took place, the
dead animals being disposed of by the side of the road. A snapshot of the
men assembled that night or on the later re-match would have proven
interesting, a rogue’s gallery of criminals ranging from the petty to
hardened, ex and current coppers variously bent, a few local
businessmen, councilors and other pillars of the community, the odd
punter, and at least one murderer.

2) Some people have suggested that it was the fact that the house stood
alone that allowed the Hanson’s crimes to go undetected for so long,
though clearly this fails to account for the ease with which the Hanson’s
were able to abduct, murder and bury at least five other women over a
fifteen year period in their previous home. During later excavations at
both Angel Street and Clarence Road along with much more extensive
digs in Turnpike Field the question was raised again as to how so many
women could have been killed, dismembered and buried with no-one
noticing, especially given the number of people, lodgers, associates,
neighbours who were in and out of the house at both addresses over the
years. It also raised the question as to how Robert Hanson had managed
to avoid being arrested for so long despite numerous convictions for theft
and public order offences as a teenager, along with the disappearance of
at least one ex-wife and two children, and there were implications that
people higher up in the police or local council were “associated” in some
ways both with the pornography that was made in and distributed from
both premises as well as the prostitution and that it was the impunity that
this association granted that allowed much more significant crimes to
occur.
3) She might well have added. “And you will help him.”

Agne’s story is perhaps representative of many of the people who passed

through the Hanson’s hands. She was effectively given to the Hanson’s by
a Polish worker, Karel Marek from Katowice who spent time in and
around Yorkshire in the late eighties and early nineties, becoming
friendly with them as a lodger. A deal of some kind was struck, possibly
in return for sexual favours from Mary Hanson and a number of the other
girls who were in and out of the de facto brothel that she ran at the
address, and it was arranged that he would send his oldest daughter to
them to act as an au pair as soon as she reached the age of sixteen. Agnes
was one of five children and regarded as the idiot in the family. She lived
a life of indentured servitude at the Hanson’s. From the start her
behaviour was closely regulated by both Robert and Mary Hanson. She
received board and lodgings in return for looking after the children, was
in theory allowed to phone home once a month, but in reality often spent
months between phone calls. Her English was limited and her
interactions with anyone outside the immediate circle of the Hanson’s,
their children and associates was non-existent. She was subject to rapes
and beatings by both her benefactors from the first day she arrived in the
country.

4) This was the first time I saw Jessica Hanson.

I mistakenly believed that the older Wendy Hanson lived in the

outhouse/room behind the kitchen, though they were in fact Agnes’
quarters. Wendy and Jessica both slept on the second floor and Mum and
Dad were especially keen to keep their girls close it seems, though this
doesn’t mean that Steven Hanson was not himself routinely sodomised in
addition to being forced to perform oral sex on both his sisters and his
parents.

Jessica Hanson though it was unknown to me at the time was kept in a

small attic room above the bar. Born in 1990 she would, at that point
have been six years old, she had never attended school and was to all
intents and purposes invisible to the authorities. Mary and Robert
Hanson claimed to neighbours and other family members that Robert
Hanson’s eldest daughter by his first wife, Susan Hanson had left with the
child not long after she was born following an argument over money and
the child’s upkeep, but the subsequent investigation proved this to be
untrue. Susan Hanson was raped and murdered and her body
dismembered in the winter of 1992. Her daughter then fell into the
clutches of Robert and Mary Hanson.

5) I understood something of the recent history of Castleford from talking

to Andy and from having watched police officers on horseback baton
charge lines of pickets on TV a decade earlier as my father fulminated
and my mother told him to calm down. I also remember how Andy came
storming back into the warehouse muttering to himself one day, his face
dark. He had been talking to one of the security guards across in the main
factory, a porcine, red-cheeked man with a grey comb-over who had
admitted that at certain points during the miner’s strike the army had
been drafted in and camouflaged as police. I understood that it was a
community torn apart and divided now sinking ever more gradually into
terminal collapse.

It was my broad though not very well-informed affiliation with these

concerns that I expressed that first night in the Hanson’s and which were
met with scorn and incredulity.

6) In the run up to the trial there was much speculation in the media as
to why members of the Hanson and Letts’ extended family were so
unconcerned about Susan’s disappearance. The clear answer is that both
Robert and Mary Hanson were estranged from their family and had been
for many years. Andrew Hanson, for example saw Robert his brother
once or twice a year and then often only by chance and Susan’s paternal
grandparents had passed away within the past few years.

On Mary Hanson’s side relations with her immediate family had been
virtually non-existent for three decades. Her father, a notoriously violent
man, had thrown her out of the house at Michael Street in the May of
1972 disgusted by her promiscuity. Mary Hanson seems to have been
excessively sexual from a young age, and this sexual precocity was later
used in defense of her assaults on girls as young as four. The defense
argued that it was having been inducted into sex at the hands of an
abusive father and other members of her large and loose knit extended
family that had lead her to erroneously believe all children were similarly
inclined.
7) William Derrick was just one of the many people who had passed
through Mary and Robert Hanson’s houses over the years. Dropping out
of school when he was fourteen he initially worked as a day labourer
around West Yorkshire before drifting into bare knuckle fighting. He was
taken under Robert Hanson and Charles Letts’ wing after winning a fight
outside The Boat Inn, a notorious drinking spot in the late eighties. From
that point on he was employed by Hanson and Letts in a number of
capacities, as an all purpose labourer, a debt collector and a prize fighter.
Living with the Hansons between 1992 and 1994 he moved out when a
rift formed with Robert Hanson over Mary Hanson’s prostitution. He and
Mary Hanson had become lovers almost immediately, Mary later boasting
to others that she had taken his virginity. The argument is believed to
have revolved around his reluctance to be filmed having sex with her.
Robert Hanson moved him into a flat on the notorious Airdale estate that
had previously belonged to Mary Hanson’s sisters Adele, who had died of
liver cancer the year before. The relationship continued to be amicable if
strained up to Derrick’s death.

8) Charles Letts was a cousin of Mary Hanson’s who had begun an early
sexual relationship with her in the summer of 1965 when she was eleven,
and which continued with Robert Hanson’s knowledge throughout the
next three decades. There is still a great deal of ambiguity over Lett’s role
and relationship with the authorities at the time of his arrest. In early
reports on the case Letts was portrayed as the most trusted of Robert
Hanson’s associates and the main distributor for the videos that Robert
and Mary Hanson made in the house, despite later claiming to have been
unaware of the content of some of the films, insisting during police
question that as far as he understood they were simply “blue” movies.
Later investigators into the case have tended to contest both these claims.
Firstly, there was almost universal assertion among Castleford’s criminal
underclass that Charles Letts was the brains behind the operation, and
that Robert Hanson was largely tolerated due to his being a family
member. The real relationship they argue was between Charlie and Mary,
with Robert Hanson as a kind of useful idiot who ran errands. There is
little doubt that Letts was fully aware of the content of the videos he
helped to distribute and that he was using contacts he had built up in
prison while serving a sentence for statutory rape in the sex offenders
wing of Armleigh in 1989.

9) The garden was, of course Robert Hanson’s first choice as a location for
burying bodies, anywhere else required effort and entailed the small
possibility of being stopped by the police with a dismembered corpse
wrapped in polythene in the boot or slopping around in black bin bags in
the back seat. Prior to the move to Angel Road in 1982 he had used
Turnpike Field, in which arguably many more of his victims still remain
undiscovered.

The remains of the nine women buried at Angel Road were found both
in the garden, under the extension that Robert Hanson had illegally
tacked on to the back of the house in the mid eighties and under the
foundations of the garage cum storehouse. The first of the victims to be
disinterred was also the first to have been buried, Hayley Knight, who
went missing on her way back to Castleford from Leeds in the August of
1983. If the bodies discovered at Angel road represent the total number of
Robert Hanson’s victims over the fourteen years he was in residence
there then it appears that the murders came in two distinct phases
clustered around 1983 and 1989 with a single relapse in 1992, though
there is some dispute as to whether Susan Hansons murder was sexually
motivated. Agnes was his final victim and this is rightly considered to
have been unequivocally a practical consideration. It is also argued that
once both Agnes and Jessica were in the house the need to murder was
tempered by the easy accessibility of torture.

It was the discovery of Hayley Knight’s remains that first made the sexual
nature of the Hanson’s crimes evident. The injuries she had sustained and
the fact that the skull was found completely encased in black scotch tape
lead to the conclusion that Knight had been subjected to sadomasochistic
practices prior to being killed. The body was missing numerous small
bones that lead the forensic team to conclude that Hanson had kept them
for souvenirs, and this pattern was repeated with all subsequent finds. It
was only once Agnes’ body had been discovered, surprisingly late on in
the search given how recent the burial was that the exact nature of much
what the Hansons did to the other victims came to light. Jessica Hanson
had also been taken into care and although incapable of giving any real
testimony to the catalogue of barely imaginable abuses she had suffered at
he grandparents hands the extremity of the genital mutilation revealed
by initial medical examinations was enough to indicate the highly
aberrant nature of the Hanson’s sexuality.

Neither the souvenirs that Robert Hanson kept or his notorious “toolbox”
were ever found, leading to the conclusion that they were smuggled out
of the house in the period between Robert Hanson and Mary Hanson’s
arrests. The toolbox has taken on a certain role in modern mythology
though some pundits have cast doubt on its existence at all. I can
however confirm, having seen it in use on the day I was invited by
Robert Hanson into his “studio”, that it was in fact a large brown canvas
hold all containing a number of roughly adapted or home made devices
including a speculum covered in barbed wire, a number of double ended
dildos clad in various grades of sandpaper and an egg whisk onto which
fishing hooks had been soldered. There can be little doubt that the
toolbox contained many more such implements but these were the only
ones I personally witnessed being used on Jessica Hanson.

10) The victims discovered at Angel Road ran chronologically as follows:

Lynda Chambers (1965-1982)

The first of the Hanson’s nannies Lynda Chambers came from a broken
home and met Robert Hanson outside the Boat Inn in Ferry Fryston
sometime in the summer of 1991. She almost immediately took up the
post that was offered her and very shortly afterward became pregnant by
Robert Hanson. Their relationship was a cause of intense controversy
between husband and wife. She was murdered in the final trimester of
her pregnancy and the skeleton of her unborn child was discovered next
to her. It had also been dismembered, something which suggests that the
procedure was not simply a practical consideration for Hanson as he
routinely claimed but one which he actively took pleasure in. Whether
the fetus was removed before or after Lynda Chambers was suffocated by
the masking tape the Hansons wound around her head is still open to
speculation.

Alison Clough. (1962-1983) Having recently graduated from a fine arts

degree at Goldsmith University Alison Clough, against her friends advice,
set of hitchhiking back to her hometown of Manchester in the late
summer of 1983. At some point on her way home her path crossed
Robert Hanson’s who was certain to stop to offer any attractive young
blonde women a lift. She was gagged and her hands tied behind her back
with wire, then she was repeatedly stabbed, probably by Mary Hanson, as
it was around this time that she was admitted to a local accident and
emergency with a deep cut across the back of her hand which she
claimed she had incurred, “cutting up vegetables.” Robert Hanson
removed the legs and the head prior to the burial, probably with an axe

Shirley West (1962-1983) a mere two months later it was Robert

Hanson’s turn to attend hospital with a wounded hand. It is the week or
so between Shirley West’s disappearance from a bus stop in Harrogate
and Hansons’ seeking medical attention for the injury that points to West
having been held prisoner in the Hanson’s cellar for some number of days
prior to her death. Of all the bodies unearthed it is Shirley West’s that
bore the evidence of the greatest number of blows from the axes, knives
and saws that Hanson used, as well as the most concerted attempt at a full
disarticulation of the skeleton. It was probably an attempt to remove a
difficult portion of bone, such as the shoulder blade that caused Hanson
to injure himself in this way.

Carol Robinson (1960-1984) While middle-class Shirley West’s

disappearance launched a nationwide search, Carol Robinson’s in January
1984 passed unremarked on by anyone. She had been on the periphery of
the Letts-Hanson family for a few years and had lodged with the Hansons
for a few months in 1993. The exact circumstances of her abduction are
unknown, her body was discovered virtually intact, trussed up with
washing line. There was a small fracture to the base of her skull, but it is
more likely that she died of oxygen starvation , restricting breathing was
something the Hansons were sexually excited by. It is most likely that the
injury came from an abortive attempt to decapitate the body. Robert
Hanson was perhaps mindful of the injury he had caused himself with
Shirley West.

Deborah Partridge. (1972-1989) While there is speculation as to why the

Hansons took such a sustained break from murder after having achieved a
rate of one victim every three to four months in 1982-1983 there seems
to be no definitive answer to this, nor to why in 1988-89 there was
another outbreak of crimes. Some commentators suggest that there was
no break as such and attribute a high proportion of the missing persons
around the time to Robert Hanson, arguing that the costly and therefore
incomplete excavation of Turnpike Field would have revealed many
more victims. It’s not that they stopped it is simply that they stopped
burying the victims “ at home.” It is not known how Deborah Partridge,
who was living in care until she absconded in July 1988 ended up buried
in the foundations for the Hanson’s garage but it may simply have been
an opportunistic encounter with a hitchhiker that sparked off another
round of murders.

Caroline Cooper (1968-1989) A former prostitute and associate of Mary

Hanson’s who is believed to have had the misfortune to return to the
Hanson’s on a social call after many years of being out of the area.

Teresa Hubbard (1972-1989) Teresa Hubbard was living in care when she
went missing n October 1989.

Susan Hanson (1975-1992)

Agnes Marek(1978-1996)

These are of course only the bodies of the women found at Angel road.
Another three sets of remains were found at Clarence Road, including
those of Robert Hanson’s child with his first wife Suzy McClaren, who it
is believed Mary Hanson murdered in 1981 . McClaren’s remains were
discovered at Turnpike field along with those of an unidentified woman,
before the search was abandoned.

11) At the time the media focus was split between lurid exposes in the
tabloids of the Hansons’ extreme sexual practices and a certain amount of
liberal hand wringing from the broadsheets regarding the state of the
nation, something that both the Hanson’s going undetected for so long
and the failure of the police and welfare services to pick up on the
disappearance of and the abuse meted out to the children tied into. Are
we not finally all responsible for what Jessica Hanson has suffered? etc.

The focus was almost exclusively on Jessica Hanson in the tabloids as

might be expected, and still very largely the focus in the broadsheets.
There can be little doubt that both her striking prettiness and the
appallingly damaged nature of both her body and psyche were what
made her such a locus of obsessive interest. The one picture of her that
was released to the press, of her sitting sullen and bruised in a safe house,
her blonde hair washed, deloused and combed, wearing a pair of jeans
and a glittery t-shirt, was endlessly reproduced.

There was significant media interest in both the Hanson’s and the Lett’s
extended families and the broadly interlinked criminal clans that had,
some argued, sprung up everywhere as a response to the breakdown in
traditional forms of civic society. While many of these observations may
have been true of Britain as it stood then and still stands today, my own
experience of the Hanson’s was that their class sympathies and affiliations
were limited, indeed as mentioned earlier, my first attempt to allude to
my own working class background and my identification with many of
the struggles that had gone on in Castelford and other pit towns was met
with scepticism and hostility. The Hansons were not a working class
family fallen on hard times and resorting to criminality, though
undoubtedly many of their associates were. The Hansons and Letts had
always been peripheral to the towns main industry, none had ever been
miners and had survived through various semi-legal our outright criminal
activities even during the towns periods of relative prosperity.

12) What I was hearing was Robert and Mary Hanson filming one of
their assaults on Agnes. This was the last film they made of her before the
murder and the next to last Robert Hanson ever made. In the initial
search of the house the videos were ignored, the police were acting on an
anonymous tip off over contraband cigarettes and alcohol and were not
yet embroiled in the largest murder enquiry ever to take place on British
soil. Between their first visit, Robert Hanson’s being taken into custody
and the subsequent return to the house to begin searching for bodies the
videos had all been spirited away. Intriguingly many commentators on
the case believe that Charles Letts was responsible for both the initial
anonymous tip off and the subsequent disposal of the videos, leading to
speculation that he returned to the house either to dispose of evidence
that would have incriminated him or Mary Hanson.

Agnes’ remains still bore many of the injuries that were inflicted on that
night, specifically the series of fine lacerations in and around her already
heavily scarified genitals that lead forensic tem to conclude that some
implement augmented with scalpel blades had been employed There was
also traces of powdered glass found in both the vagina and anus along
with a number of pins, some of them now rusted that had been pushed in
to her over the years, along with the extensive burns to both her breasts
and the inside of her vagina and anus. Her clitoris had at some point been
removed, the injury being consistent with the supposition that it had
been bitten or chewed off. The nipple of her left breast was missing and
the breast itself was gangrenous. Had Robert Hanson not murdered her
there is little doubt that she would have died of her injuries within a few
months.

Robert Hanson’s bleakly comic answers when asked to comment on the

extent and nature of the injuries to both Agnes and Jessica have now also
passed in to folklore. With regard to Agnes, his initial response was “She
were clumsy”. His granddaughter he claimed had fallen off her bike in
the garden and that the handlebar had pierced her vagina. Asked to
explain the anal injuries he paused for a moment and replied.
“It were the brake.”
It was these injuries and the constant pain she was in that gave Agnes her
strange, ungainly gate. This was also true of Jessica Hanson, though the
permanent malformation of her hips and spine was caused by the weights
Robert Hanson hung from the loop of wire he had pushed through the
front wall of her vagina and out through her lower abdomen as an infant,
though at some stage this was removed and replaced by the studier chain
that I myself witnessed. The weights were used to immobilise or slow her
down and the subsequent distortion of her pubic bone, hips and the
lower part of her back as she grew was caused by her either having to
squat over the weight if it was intended to hold her in place or drag it
with her when she moved. This was the main cause of her later mobility
problems.

13) The videos that do survive, and of which extensive use was made in
the three part documentary on the Hanson’s “ Killing for the family”
broadcast on channel Five in October 2002 are relatively innocuous s
early efforts that show Mary Hanson entertaining clients in either the
bedroom of the house in Clarence Road or Angel Street. Robert Hanson
was obsessed with cameras from a young age and was probably among
the first people in the country to own a video camera. This obsession
with capturing his wife’s sexual activity and later that of their own with
their children had more than a purely commercial motive. It has been
suggested by some observers that at times the Hansons would put on a
video of a sexual assault on one of their children then sit together on the
sofa watching it, the way any normal family might leaf through an album
o f snapshots. Whether they ever invited their children in to watch along
with them remains unknown.
14) Something the Hanson’s had yet to get into selling was drugs. At this
stage the pandemic heroin use that currently blights the former pit towns
had yet to reach its highest point. Charles Lett’s may have collaborated in
the production and distribution of child pornography but he drew the
line at drugs. On one terrifying visit to the Airedale estate during which I
stayed sweating in the van hoping I wouldn’t be called out to participate
in the meeting Charlie had arranged with some local heroin dealers he
returned to the van scowling and sat even more intensely preoccupied
than usual during the drive across town. “This town’ll be nowt but
junkies and dealers soon,” he said bitterly.

15) There were initial attempts by the defence to claim that while Mary
Hanson had participated in the abuse of the children and the girls that
Robert Hanson abducted she was herself unaware of the subsequent
murders her husband committed. Mary Hanson attracted much greater
opprobrium in the press even than Robert Hanson. She was eventually
convicted of murder in the face of overwhelming evidence despite
maintaining her ignorance of the killings, especially that of her daughter
to the end.

The prosecution also managed to produce Julie Stanton, who claimed to

have had an affair with both Robert and Mary Hanson throughout the
winter of 1988 and who broke of relations with them as Mary’s
lovemaking became increasingly violent. Her testimony helped confirm
Mary Hanson’s unorthodox sexual practices. After an evening in which
she was bound and gagged, had hot wax dripped onto her breasts and
genitals and was repeatedly bitten by Mary Hanson while Robert Hanson
filmed them both she vowed never to return. She was then subject to
harassment by the Hansons, specifically Mary, who bombarded her with
phone calls, threatening that she would be raped and murdered by one of
the Hanson clan. It was the very real nature of these threats that
prompted her some six months later to move to Pontefract.

16) As one commentator has observed of the Hansons, without each

other, individually, they might never have gone as far as they did. Robert
Hanson would perhaps have remained a jack of all trades, an occasional,
opportunistic thief and rapist, Mary Hanson would have been little more
than a local prostitute. What is certain is that on meting they recognized
some deep and secret legitimization of their darkest desires in each other.
However much they may have argued, the correspondences between
them throughout their marriage was full of endearments and
proclamations of love and continued to be so even when Robert Hanson
was initially arrested. It is widely held that much of the incoherent and
contradictory nature of Robert Hanson’s testimony stemmed from his
desperation to keep Mary Hanson’s involvement a secret. His suicide is
also thought to have been provoked by Mary Hanson’s fully-fledged and
necessary rejection of him once the murders were revealed in order to
maintain the façade of her innocence. Though Robert Hanson must have
understood this, still the prospect of having fallen out favour with his
wife obsessed him in his last few days.
 That they managed to abduct, rape and murder at least fourteen women,
kill one of their own children and systematically rape the others in total
secrecy for almost twenty years remains a perverse testimony to the
strength of the bond between them.

17)
 Part two

Here I am, sitting at my desk in the little room that we’ll soon start doing
up for the baby, in my role as teacher, husband, father-to-be. For now it’s
my “study”, as we jokingly call it. I shouldn’t need long to get everything
down. After all, I don’t need to invent anything, and research will be
minimal. It’s simply the facts of my life that are required, and as
straightforwardly as possible.

I’ve been in here for the past three nights, since Sunday. Straight after
dinner, about eight, Andrea has gone to study and I’ve come in here to
write and worked away on the old desktop for a few hours. There isn’t a
lot of space. I’ve jammed a computer table in against the wall next to the
window. The room is filled with laundry and various odds and ends, a
broken TV that we haven’t got round to getting rid of yet and piles of old
books.

I have spent a lot of time staring out of the window at the road watching
trains pulling in and out of Maze Hill station and the kids playing in the
basketball court opposite the house. Even so, I feel I’ve been fairly
productive so far. The nights are getting long now and it’s still light at
nine. Summer’s almost here and I’m feeling optimistic, ready to write
this, to get it down and get it published.

One of the main problems is that it’s hard for me to stop thinking about
how different our lives will be once it’s finished. What a surprise it will
be for her. The money, the chance to live somewhere else comfortably,
with no more stresses and strains.

I have kept Andrea in the dark a little about what I’m in here doing. She
knows that I’m writing but not exactly what. I haven’t told her for a
number of reasons (1), firstly because she knows nothing at all about the
particular period of my life that I’m going to bring to light. No-one does,
other than those who were involved, and most of them are dead now.
Secondly, because she gets annoyed when I tell her about my plans, as
she says I never get round to doing most of the things I talk about.

Actually, when she first said this to me I was offended. A few years ago I
would have been extremely offended, probably, and very likely have
stayed in a bad mood for quite some time. These days I’m more self-
aware, more honest with myself, and better with criticism, something
that our relationship has helped me to become. But it is true that I like
talking about the future, in fact it’s all I talk about. Perhaps because I
have had to avoid looking too closely at the past.

I admit that I’m not very practical and that it’s especially when I launch
into my plans for this room, the colours we can paint it, the wallpaper,
the mobiles I’ll make, the shelves I’ll put up, what I’ll build, that I can
sense that she’s sceptical. Finding the time after work to do it and also
writing this, trying to get this finished in time, will be tricky, I agree, but
not impossible. I have a reasonable amount of spare time, I work a
twenty-minute walk away from the house, I finish at four o’clock and the
work itself, teaching English, is easy enough. So Andrea may be doubtful,
may think it’s just more talk, but I’ve lived long enough now to shed any
of my earlier idealism, if it ever really was that.

I realised suddenly, just a few months ago, out of nowhere, the old veil-
being-lifted-from-the-eyes moment that it was me who had to change. It
struck me quite forcefully as I was walking home one evening, four thirty
or so. Nothing really presaged this moment of realization, nothing direct,
probably it had been creeping up on me for years, maybe it was the news
about the baby that sped the whole process up, really brought it home.
Suddenly I thought, this is your life, here, with her, in this world and all
those lives you imagined will never be yours, the world you thought was
promised you will never be brought into existence.

Instead of melancholy, which is a state of mind I have been prone to, I

felt a certain satisfaction, relief. And from that moment I knew what I
had to do.

What I had to do was make some money.(2)

It’s not that I’m greedy or materialistic, quite the opposite. I’ve never
really had any money and it doesn’t look much like I’ll be making any in
the near future. For a long time that didn’t seem to matter. These days it’s
starting to worry me. I know there are people worse off than we are,
people with no education at all, with even smaller incomes. We survive,
but only just, and when I look at the future I see us slipping further and
further down.
I want to get us out of here. I don’t want to bring my children up in
London. I dream of wide open spaces, sunlight, peace, stability. We both
do, but we’re stuck. We need a sum, a substantial sum to get out and to be
able to stay out.

For over a decade now I’ve been an English Language teacher. Low
status, low pay. You keep your head above water and that’s it. I am not
bad at my job, but there’s nothing else I can see myself doing. I have the
wrong kind of temperament for the world of work. I’m certainly not a
corporate type. Nor am I getting any younger. The reality is that at my
age, thirty-seven, I’m long past the stage where I can get a foot on any
kind of ladder or make any kind of dramatic U-turn. It’s not so much that
I don’t like what I do for a living anymore, it’s that it just doesn’t pay
enough for me to plan any kind of future on.

I don’t want Andrea to work anymore. I don’t want to see the routine
wear her down. I don’t want to see her come home everyday, tired and
depressed, with just enough energy to eat and crawl up the stairs to bed. I
want to spend time with my children when they arrive. Perhaps it’s more
than I have the right to expect, perhaps I should just knuckle down and
be grateful that it could always be worse, but I want to be free to enjoy
my life and the company of those people I love. And for that I need
money.

For a long time I imagined that it would all be put right somehow,
corrected, that there would be a shift in the way things are set up that
would make the world fairer, that would favour people like me, but I
look around and I know that’s not going to happen. The world is only
going one way. I’ve wised up, just like they said I would one day. I’ve
learned to be realistic. You have to play the game.

I have just one ace up my sleeve.

 When I think about Andrea honestly, she saved my life. By 2001, after
five years of drifting from job to job around Europe I was a barely
functioning alcoholic.

We met in Barcelona. I had no particular reason for going there, it was

simply somewhere I hadn’t been yet. Someone in Berlin had told me it
was cheap and said that they had had a good time there. So when my year
contract at English First Berlin finished I booked a cheap flight. It was
July, most of the schools were closed. I had two months of crashing in a
hostel and wandering the city in the scorching heat before I could try and
find a job. I had just enough Deutschmarks to eke out a reasonable level
of drinking if I drank cheaply and didn’t get over-fussy about eating.

Over the five years between fleeing Robert Hanson’s with as much
money as I could steal and arriving in Barcelona, I had lived and worked
in five different countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia
and Germany, hanging out with the other English teachers, a motley,
disaffected crew, drinkers to a man. I just about held down the jobs, as
did almost everyone except for those few, widely ridiculed ones who took
it all seriously and were looking to get ahead, climb the short ladder to
Director of Studies. If it hadn’t been for the generally low expectations
and the desperation to hire native speakers most of us would have been
out on our ears after a few months.

In those few years I made no significant friends and slept with no

women, despite a few abortive attempts by colleagues to get me to enjoy
myself in brothels in Prague and Warsaw. Before, I’d been talkative, full
of ideas, full of flair, but I was sunken in on myself almost incapable of
speaking. I slept badly. I had terrible dreams. I existed within a cloud of
pain, paranoia and exhaustion that served to keep me from reflecting on
what had occurred. I was cocooning myself in some ways, waiting for my
mind to finish the process of covering over and interring the memory of
Robert Hanson and my time in his power.

Certainly when I arrived in Barcelona I was in a disastrous state of

physical and mental health but I had become so accustomed to it I simply
felt that this was how the world was. I could no longer distinguish
between my own sickness and the structure of things. I’m tall, around
about six-foot four and at that stage I weighed a little over ten stone. I
never fully sobered up, woke up drunk, hung on a few grim hours lying
motionless in bed until the hangover started to kick in, then drank a
couple of the cans of beer I kept next to the bed to buffer it, went
shambling about the streets in a sweat and wreathed in stale breath and
beer fumes until mid-afternoon when I succumbed and hit a bar.

In Barcelona the bar I chose was “The Travel Bar”, a backpacker’s bar
right in the centre of town. It was overpriced, something the committed
drinker normally avoids, but a place where at least you could sit and chat
to whoever drifted through should you feel like it.

I spent everyday in there for the first two weeks, hunched silently at the
bar smoking Ducados and inspecting the unchanging array of bottles
behind the bar, exchanging pleasantries with the bar staff. Andrea was
one of them and as the days passed we began to chat a little more. She
had lived in Germany too, learning the language, working as an au pair. I
complimented her on her English, she pointed out places of interest to
see on a wall map beside the bar.
I would like to say that it was love at first sight, that we were swept
away, dancing on air, that instantaneously I knew that she was the one.
But our relationship, our love for each other was more tentative than
that, more piecemeal, it wasn’t marked by grand passion. I was too
withdrawn and cynical, she was too shy and wary. We had both been
disappointed in love, I suppose. Probably, we distrusted it. She had had a
similarly intense love at the same age I was with Rachael and had seen
how easily it can go wrong. We developed a friendship that gradually
became a relationship. Perhaps it was how different we were from each
other, how far we would have to travel out of ourselves to meet each
other that drew us together. But at first, more than anything, it was the
fact that she was kind to me. It made me want to repay her kindness, to
see her happy and rewarded for being good. To do that, I had to live.
Something that’s been important in our relationship is how well Andrea
gets on with my mum and dad.

I kept my other girlfriends away from them, especially Rachael. I was

worried that they would say something inappropriate. More than that, I
was embarrassed by them, they were a part of my life I didn’t want to
acknowledge existed, the poor, provincial part. The same applied to my
hometown, I would never have taken Rachael back to Barrow in Furness,
but you can’t hide your wife away. Besides, Andrea wanted to know
them. It’s a part of her being South American I suppose, placing a lot of
importance on family. My mum and dad love her of course. My dad is
impressed by her grasp of languages and the fact that he has someone to
show off his knowledge of global affairs to, my mum’s happy that I’ve
found someone sensible, who doesn’t drink and have settled down at last.

It’s meant that I’ve seen a lot more of them over the past five years or so.
Certainly more than I did over the previous decade. They come and visit
twice a year on route to my sister’s place in Ramsgate. My relationship
with them is complicated. It’s very hard for me to disentangle all the
feelings of shame and anger I have about my past. There’s something
about where I’m from, our circumstances and their aspirations for me
that I carry around like a stain, something about seeing them that
depresses me just as much as it makes me feel proud.
Over the past five years I have been trying in a way to tie all the strands
of my life together. I had got accustomed to thinking of life as a series of
separate domains, family, friends, work, relationship, the past, the future
and then felt under attack from all the claims and counterclaims. Over
the past few years with Andrea past and present have started to merge,
different strands of my life have been brought together, I’ve felt myself
reintegrating, or perhaps integrating for the first time and the fabric of
life has been more closely knit, the pattern clearer.

The baby took us both by surprise.

They tell me that whatever reservations you may have had are
immediately swept away once the child, “this amazing little person”, was
actually the way I think my colleague Laura referred to her own, is in
your life. They also assure me there’s no right time to have a child. The
sooner the better seems to be the consensus. You find a way of getting by.

I’m sure all this is true, but then most of them have a pretty reasonable
joint income, a foot on the property ladder already, parents who could
help them out with a deposit, or babysitting. We have none of these
things, and children are expensive.

We were supposed to be keeping it secret until Andrea had her twelve

week scan, but she couldn’t resist telling her mum and most evenings
now she’s on the phone to her in Argentina. Her mum’s delighted of
course, as mine will be when she finds out.

Perhaps I should be on the phone talking for hours to my dad about

paternity. I don’t expect he’ll have much to say. He’ll be pleased, but for
him everything is a mixed blessing. He tends towards scepticism and
negativity, something which infuriates my sister. In that respect I’m
certainly my father’s son.

The older I get the more I realise how like him I am and the more
accepting I’ve become of that fact. When I was a rebellious teenager and
young man I believed I was nothing like him at all, but more and more I
see how my internal world is set up the same way as his.

When we went back to visit them last year I heard him talking to
himself in the kitchen as he washed the pots. Andrea had gone to bed and
we’d stayed up late talking, past midnight. He was arguing with himself,
arguing against some phantom interlocutor out there in the darkness of
the garden, whoever he’d just seen on Newsnight, probably, challenging
their beliefs.

If only he’d had an education, he’d have shown them. I leant in the
doorway behind him watching, teacup in my hand. He’s in his seventies
now but still in good shape, still lifts weights out in the garage three
times a week, never smoked, a teetotaller. He’s impressed that I speak a
bit of Spanish now as he’s been teaching himself German for years. Every
now and then we suggest going there for a holiday so he can practice a
little, put it to use after thirty years of hunching over a book at the living
room table. He always backs out though.
Given my opportunities he would have failed in identical ways. He has
no idea just how difficult life outside his little town is, just how
overwhelmingly vast the world of ideas really is. He couldn’t even make
it as a shop steward for more than six months. And yet even at this late
stage, he still dreams of being a leader of men. A Napoleon, a Caeser, in
his kitchen, wagging his finger at the reflection in the window and
ordering his imaginary empire around him.

Do we ever stop trying to persuade ourselves that we are what we are

not?

It took them twenty years to buy that house.

The fact that I’m in here writing is causing a little bit of friction between
us.

Andrea resents it when I could be doing something more useful around

the house and there is the eternal question of the shelves. I have been
saying that I’ll put some up in the living room, in order to get the stacks
of books and cds off the floor, for the best part of two years now. She
used to not care about stuff like that at all.

Also she doesn’t understand why I have chosen now, of all moments, to
start writing after all the years I’ve had to write in and in which I’ve let
the time slip by.

Every fifteen minutes she’s calling me in to ask me to massage her legs or

show me something on the internet about nutrition. She wants a bit of
pampering and special attention now that she’s pregnant. I remind her
that she should be writing her essay, that I too have stuff to write No
sooner have I settled in to my chair again than she’s calling me back.

She misses home, more and more every year that she’s here. The idea of
having the baby here away from grandparents who would dote on it the
way she was doted on and that big extended family who would always be
around to help instead troubles her. The thought of being isolated here in
London with my own parents miles away.
She has her fears, her needs. I try to be as understanding and as patient I
can be.

“I always wanted to write,” I tell her when she quizzes me. “I always said
I would write something, someday. You liked that in me when we met,
the fact that I had aspirations to write.”

“Yes, but is now the time? Now that we have the baby due. You don’t
seem very involved.” We were standing in the downstairs’ room, she was
showing me an article she’d found on the internet about a health scare
for mothers-to-be connected to drinking water from plastic bottles.

I looked flabbergasted. “Of course I’m involved.”

“I want you to be as happy about this as I am,” she said.

I checked myself. I can only be as happy as I am about it, I almost said.

This is the kind of knee-jerk, flip response that always got me in trouble
before. “I am happy,” I told her. “I am. But I really need to do this.”

I am happy.

“But are you actually doing anything in there?”

“Yes, yes. What? Do you want to come and check, is that it?”
“Why now? Why choose now, that’s what I don’t understand?”

I know what she thinks. She thinks that I’m avoiding something, her, my
life, when all I’m trying to do is make it better.

“Look,” I said. “I want to write something that I can get published and get
it out of the way before the baby’s here.”

“Something you can get published?” She looked surprised, sceptical.

Another one of my pipe dreams.

“This will get published,” I told her. “I know it. I can guarantee it.”

She turned abruptly back to the computer, squinting at the screen,

leaving me hanging there. She summons me, finds me wanting, dismisses
me.

She has lines at the sides of her eyes now, her cheeks hang a little heavier
than they did before. There was something momentarily defeated about
her, about both of us. I felt a wave of tenderness and remorse that I
wasn’t sure how to act on pass over me.

I came back up the stairs and sat here in my chair, my fingers itching
with the residue of the gesture I should have made.
With the accumulated weight of all the gestures I have never made.

Yes, the baby took us both by surprise.

Which is to say it was unplanned. Not that we hadn’t discussed the

possibility before, but we had always kept it vague. Maybe one day.
There was still time for Andrea, who’s seven years younger than me. I
had no real sense of urgency despite slowly creeping my way closer to
forty.

And then one day, there we were. I came home on the Tuesday and
Andrea was looking pensive in the kitchen. She told me straight away. At
first I thought she must have got it wrong. We always use condoms and
to be honest it’s not as though we’re having sex as often as we used to.
“Are you sure?” I asked.

The kettle had been boiling and it clicked off in a cloud of steam.

“I’m not having an abortion,” she told me, looking up at me defiantly. I

stepped quickly in and held her to me.

“No, Jesus, no. Of course not, of course not.” I rubbed her back to soothe
her. “It’s just, it’s unexpected,” I said.

“You don’t seem very pleased.” She was holding herself rigid against me.

Well neither do you, I almost said, then thought better of it. “It’s a
surprise that’s all,” I told her again. I held her out at arms length so I
could look at her, but she didn’t meet my eye.

“No contraception is one hundred percent effective, you know.”

I smiled, but still, this was a bad start.

“Come on,” I said, I lead her into the living room and sat her down on
the sofa, put my arms round her, kissed her face. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s a
shock for you too.” I put my hand on her stomach and she softened a
little, leaned her head against my shoulder. She’s so independent. So
determined to be strong enough to go it alone if need be. She’s seen so
many women left to fend for themselves, bring up children on their own,
her mother, aunts, grandmothers. But she needn’t worry about that. I
know what the right thing to do is.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I whispered softly into her ear.

Everything will be all right.

A question that I’ve been asking myself is whether I should write about
that time at all. I know that in doing it I’m appealing to the worst in
people in a way, exploiting the deaths and pain of others for my own
reward, exploiting the suffering of other people’s children for the sake of
my own. But if I have the choice between that and a lifetime struggling.
Well, it’s not an easy choice.

I reconcile myself that no-one will be directly hurt by what I w rite, that
I’m not exposing anyone to public scrutiny simply giving another insight
into something that’s already known. But I will need to give lots of
salacious detail in order to make it popular, to make it more than just an
account of a bleak episode in an anonymous mans mid- twenties. I will
have to write in some detail about the things I saw, about Jessica and
Billy, about Agnes. It would be best if I had a separate section where I
can deal with all the graphic stuff, something that any reader can choose
to engage with or not.

The fundamental interest will be Jessica of course. I half regret not

having stolen a couple of videos from the damp boxes they were stacked
up in. Robert Hanson had them destroyed later when he felt the net was
closing in. but what would I have down with them? Perhaps I could have
stolen the one he made me film.

I looked at another couple of books in Tesco today that seem to be in a

fairly similar vein to what I need to write, biographies of childhood abuse
and the struggle against indifference, intolerance and cruelty. There were
a couple of books on real-life crime as well, and already there’s one on
the Ipswich serial killer, something which took place a mere six or seven
months ago. There are real possibilities here then, a combination of
biography and real-life crime, especially given the way the Hanson’s have
passed into the folklore, really, as infamous as Brady and Hindley.

I spent a few minutes browsing the books. It needs to be some kind of

combination of analysis, sentiment and horror, I realized, but there
should be plenty of horror. Not a problem with the Hansons, I said to
myself and almost chuckled.(3)

I was buoyant as I went about the rest of the shopping, consulting the
highly detailed list Andrea had given me. She’s over her morning sickness
now and is both craving things she’s always hated and completely off
some of her favourite foods. She’s never had a sweet tooth but the
moment she’s eating lot of honey and carrots, though not in combination
and she can’t abide the idea of salmon, which she used to love.

I started writing the book in my mind as I browsed the aisles. “It’s only
now after so many years of not being able to face what I saw then that I
can finally start to tell the truth about my time in the house on Angel
Road….. “

That was good I felt. Struck the right kind of pious, heroic note from the
start and promised plenty of grisly thrills to come. Soon my own book
would be in here and I would be far away from this Tescos and retail
parks and South London

"Stay true to the dreams of thy youth."

I smiled, remembering that one. I used to be full up of quotes, I was
always trotting them out. It says everything about me at the age of
twenty-six. "My youth was nothing but a somber storm." That was
another. Slowly they're coming back to me. I should ring my mum and
dad, get my mum to send me my journal from that time.

Stay true to the dreams of thy youth. It’s hard for me to say exactly what
the dreams of my youth were. Some broad desire for social justice, some
desire for vindication that was inseparable from my own frustrations,
from my own thwarted ambition, from my refusal to compromise with
life in any degree.

Now, my first question, if someone came at me with that quote would

be, why are the dreams of youth any more important than the dreams of
approaching middle age? Staying shackled to the beliefs, the needs of a
younger self would just be another prison, another trap among the
thousands of traps life sets for you.
Abandon the dreams of thy youth is what I would council anyone who
asked me now, and exactly the message I would send to my younger self
if I could reach him somehow back across all those years.
What I would tell him is this: you're just like everyone else. The world's
problems are irresolvable, or even if they're not, you won't be the man to
solve them, you have neither the quality of mind, nor the strength of will
to effect any fundamental changes in the world, or in yourself.

What was the other quote?

"Had they but courage equal to desire, they would hurl the little streets
upon the big."
Well, I can see myself more clearly now. I was all desire, all grandiose
ideas and plans and nothing more. Perhaps even in my desires I lied to
myself. It was all just a great, futile evasion of my own mundanity, the
impossibility of achieving even limited aims. Didn't I secretly want
exactly what everyone else had, really? Wasn't I ashamed of how
conventional I was deep down? Just another over-grown adolescent. The
girls, the prestige, the money, the admiration, the certainty. Perhaps I felt
I had to punish myself for still wanting all the things I was supposed to be
set against.
Perhaps that’s why I found it so hard to leave the Hanson’s.
Now I'm happily removed from the desire to be anything, or anything
other than a functioning husband and father. I'll take what I can and
I'll run away and hide out somewhere safe with a women who loves me
and let the rest of the world do as they choose with each other. For a long
time I yearned for recognition of what I imagined were my “gifts”. Now
I'll be happily anonymous, unknown and prosperous. I've learned to limit
my desire, the demand I make of myself, the store I put in ideas.

Thinking back I can’t believe how miserable I was then, constantly ill,
undernourished. At one point I passed out in the DSS.

I'm surprised my system didn't give way under the strain sooner, actually.
I had never been particularly hardy. In fact when I was a child I had one
or two dizzy spells and was taken off for a blood test that revealed that I
had partial anaemia. This means that I'm more susceptible to minor
complaints than other people, especially if my iron intake gets low. At
that time, going as I often did for days eating a minimum of poor food it's
no wonder that my thoughts were scrambled, that I was susceptible to all
kinds of things.
These days I am of course much healthier. I don't drink at all. In fact I
look after myself, go to the gym three times a week, eat all the right
things. I started about three or so years ago and it was a huge help that
Andrea doesn't drink either. Initially I was a bit reluctant to think about
my diet, it seemed faddish, but I can’t deny it’s had a huge positive effect
on my mood and energy levels.

The first year or so was tough but now I can't face a drink most of the
time and on the rare occasions when I do get drunk the hangovers last
long enough to put me off for a good few more months after that.

Even though I'm clean and sober these days, all this looking back, all this
remembering being drunk, has made me a little nostalgic. If you have
ever done anything to excess, if anything has ever been fundamental to
the way you organize your life, probably the desire for it never leaves
you.

That was drinking for me. I was in love with it, I suppose. The first sip of
the first pint, the way it restores you to yourself, the way everything
opens up, all your senses blooming. While I've been sitting here, trying to
write about the terrible state of my health back then, the idea of nipping
out to the corner shop to get a cold can of beer has been flicking through
my mind.

But it's late enough already and everything is closed. In fact I should be
in bed too. Andrea is already up there. I can hear her walking around,
and I know she'll want me up there pretty soon so I don't disturb her
later. She's a light sleeper.

It's warm tonight and there's a light breeze coming in the window. The
street is quiet. Any time now the two foxes that live in the bushes along
the edge of the railway track will be coming out to nose through our
lives, pad softly through the streets.
She's upstairs waiting for me. In our bed. Alive in the night, her heart full
of love for me.
Thank God I met her. I can't imagine where I would be now, without
her. All the things I have still never told her. How could I have told her?
I've never told myself, never tried to find words for what I saw then.

I should get through it as quickly as I can, plunge into it. The sooner to
get it over with.

You will have read many things about Robert Hanson, about the house
he lived in, his children and his wife Mary. You'll have read them in
newspapers, seen reports on the TV news, in magazines, maybe even in
books that have claimed they will take you inside the mind of a
psychopath, into the heart of evil.

In fact, today I bought just such a book. "Robert Hanson: The Devil of
Angel Road" is the inevitable title. I found it today for fifty pence in a
local charity shop. After work I spent an hour or so wandering around
Greenwich looking in newsagents and remaindered bookshops.

On the cover of almost every newspaper there were reports of a little girl
who has gone missing. I was encouraged to see that the public's appetite
for these things is as enormous as ever and how quickly they forget one
child and move on to another. For a while it was Jessica Hanson that they
fastened onto, "the angel of Angel road" as they called her, with equal
inevitability.

This kind of stuff, real-life crime, is a real money-spinner, it seems.

Robert Hanson himself has spawned a mini-industry. I was half-dismayed
and half-excited looking at the newspapers, reflecting on all this. People
will pay money for this, for my account of what I've seen, of what I've
done.

It's all in the past now. Many people have profited from it I may as well
be one of them. There are no first-hand accounts of life in the house.
Hence I have an edge.

The centre of Greenwich was packed of course even though it's looking
to be one of the worst summers on record. I headed up Trafalgar Road,
past the park, toward home then kept on going. Sure enough, after a few
minutes scanning the shelves in Help the Aged, there he was on the
cover staring out at me. One of those grainy black and white photos they
always use, a mugshot. The close set eyes, the close cropped hair. He had
such tiny ears. He was all jaw and squashed, boxer's nose. You could
punch that face again and again. Break your fists against that face without
the slightest trace of recognition passing over it.

The book was written by Dennis Andrews, who has a whole slew of
other real-life crime books to his credit, books mostly on murderers,
Suttcliffe, West, Neilson, Hindley, the whole shabby crew, but also on
the Nazi's occult secrets and Japanese atrocities during the Second World
War. When I got home I sat looking at the cover, unable to open it and
begin reading. Even though I knew these people, though our lives
intersected, though I lived in the house where the majority of what this
book focuses on took place, I know next to nothing about the individual
histories of any of those involved. Robert Hanson's life I know only in
the sketchiest of outlines. The same with Mary Hanson. And as for little
Jessica, well, what is there to know?
This book will provide me with some background. It will be good for
research. As I was sitting on the sofa looking at it a kind of paralysis stole
over me. It felt as though I was being slowly crushed, that the
atmospheric pressure in the room was increasing, everything growing
heavier and darker, as though the room I sat in was dropping down
through the sea, down out of the world and into cold, lightless depths.
Just the day fading in the windows, I suppose, combined with my
understandable agitation. The half lame gallop of my heart, the taste of
something coppery leaking on the back of my tongue. Shall we go there
then? That's what I kept asking myself. Shall we, together, you and I,
return to that house? What will you give me for this?

Suddenly I heard Andrea's key in the door, ten o'clock already, back from
her Monday night class. I panicked, sitting there in the dim room, staring
at Robert Hanson's face, nothing more than a few pale blots against the
darkness now. For no good reason I immediately started hunting around
for somewhere to hide the book, my anxiety mounting as I heard her call
out "Hello?" and begin to jog up the stairs to see where I was. I shoved it
among a pile of videos and DVDs stacked up on an old computer table
next to the window a few seconds before she came in the room and saw
me hovering around. Almost immediately she asked me what I was
doing, switching on the light, leaving me hardly any time to compose
myself.

What she saw in my face, my agitation, must have shocked her.

"What is it, what's wrong, what's wrong?" she asked.

I assured her time and time again that everything was ok, trying to get
my voice, my face and eyes to match my words. Insisting that I didn't
know what she meant, that I was just sitting here with the light off,
thinking, and then I was startled when she came in and felt guilty as I
was supposed to be making dinner and I hadn't even started yet

She spent a few moments regarding me skeptically, then she shrugged it

off. Her expression changed to one of weary acceptance and she decided
to drop it. Whatever it was it probably didn't matter. It had been a long
day and did she really want to get involved in whatever all this was right
now? She didn't.

I rushed off to make dinner but all through the meal itself I was
distracted and anxious. I was trying to make conversation and listen to
her talk about her day, but the fact that the book, the book that bore the
image of Robert Hanson himself was sitting just behind her kept stealing
my attention away. I found myself repeatedly glancing past her at it until
finally, exasperated she asked, “What is wrong with you today?"

I shook my head and pulled a quizzical face.

"If I'm boring you, just tell me," she said.

"No. No," I told her. "I'm tired, tired that's all."

"You are always somewhere else, aren't you?"

We went back to chewing away at a frozen pizza in silence for a few

minutes.

I was angry and for a second I felt like revealing everything to her, felt
like saying look, look what I'm doing for you, look what I've been
through, how can your trivial little day compare to that? But instead I
kept my mouth shut and waited for my anger to subside. As usual it did
so quickly and just as predictably was followed by a surge of guilt.

I reached out and took hold of her hand across the table and she looked
up at me as if to say "It's not enough is it, this?" and I felt suddenly
queasy, catching a glimpse of her dissatisfaction.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" She smiled tightly, but there
was only frustration in her eyes. We went back to eating, the pizza, hard
and dreary, then tried again, made an effort and managed a reasonable if
strained conversation through to the end of the meal

I volunteered to wash up.

I want it out of here, this book. Tomorrow I'll bin it. I'll have no peace
until I do. It felt almost like something living as it nested in among the
papers and DVDs, at her back. A stain on the room itself. I keep checking
my fingers, sure they must be carrying traces of ink.

I should use the internet for research instead, that will have more than
enough to be going on with for now.(4)
My mum and dad have been up to London for the past few days, which
has kept me away from writing. They were on their way back from my
sisters down in Ramsgate. I met them at Waterloo East, both of them a bit
flustered after the train journey. They still haven’t got used to it yet, for
them it’s a big, nerve-wracking ordeal catching a train to London.
Immediately I felt the combination of compassion and irritation that at
one point used to be unbearable for me, but which these days I’m much
better at controlling.

On the Saturday the weather was good so we went for a picnic of sorts in
Greenwich Park. There was a certain amount of tension between us all,
partly because of the baby, with my mum and dad not really knowing
what to say about it apart from congratulations and Andrea expecting
something more effusive, perhaps. Perhaps it was also because we argued
in hushed voices in the kitchen about what to buy for the picnic. I
wanted to go to Marks and Spencer and Andrea thought it was too
expensive, telling me to get some stuff from Tesco Express just round the
corner.
 They’re my parents, I said, I can spend a few extra pounds on them, but
she was adamant that we could get it from Tesco’s and what difference
did it make except in price? I perceived her as trying to punish them in
some way for not seeming enthusiastic enough about the baby, but bit my
tongue. We compromised and I agreed to get fifty percent of the food
from one place fifty from the other, though on my way there my mood
was dark.
It’s true that we don’t have a lot of money but if we’re so fearful about
every penny that we spend we can’t splash out a little on occasion we’ll
be miserable. Do you know what they have done for me? I asked her in
my mind. How much they gave me?

When we have money I will buy them everything they could never
afford, I thought. And Andrea too. She’s used to being careful with
money, she comes from a country where instability rules the day, the
economy collapses overnight, your money disappears. I understand her
worrying over it. Even though I’ve tried to explain to her that nothing
like that can happen here, old habits die hard. Certain things are
ingrained in her, as they are in me. Money is the locus of so many fears.
When I sell this book, I thought at the self-service checkout, scanning
packs of pre-cooked chicken, all this will change.
Yes, old habits die hard. Look at my mum and dad, they’ve been retired
now for over a decade, they have a little money invested, my dad got a
compensation payment a few years ago for white finger vibration, and
still with all this time on their hands and the end getting nearer and
nearer, they stay in that little town, year in year out, stuck in their
routines, going into the centre for the shopping every Tuesday and
Thursday, out for something to eat on a Saturday afternoon, sitting doing
the crossword, watching TV, redecorating, tending the garden.
Walking across to Marks and Spencers I got depressed at the narrowness
of their lives, and what promised to be the narrowness of my own.
 Accept it, accept it, I told myself, battening down the hatches on the
fantasies that came swimming up in me, old dreams of largesse and
acclaim. Would I ever have known what to do with it anyway?
Let go of it, let go of it, this is your life I was saying to myself again and
again, my heart rate up as I scanned the shelves for wholemeal pitta
bread. This is your one chance of success.

The park was packed by twelve o’clock when we finally got there. We
found a spot up on the slope behind the boating pool, moving at Andrea’s
insistence, as far away from the group of teenagers playing football and
drinking cans of Stella as we could. After we’d eaten we headed up for
the Observatory. My mum took Andrea off for a stroll to talk about
motherhood, leaving my dad and me on the viewing platform looking out
at the Royal Naval College, the river, Canary Wharf.
“Impressive building,” my dad said. “So have you thought about what you
are going to do about a place to live then?”
I shrugged. “Well.” Well, what can we do?
He coughed and straightened. I had turned my back on the view and was
resting against the railing watching a late-thirties couple with a pram
fussing over a toddler, the man stooped, adjusting the child’s shoes as it
shouted at him, the women, cheeks flushed with irritation, staring down
at his back.
“Your mum and I, we discussed it. We can lend you a couple of
thousand.”
“Thanks,” I said, watching the irritated women pull her partner away
from the child and bend to adjust its sandals herself, her jaw tight, the
muscle ticking away. The father stood smiling benignly on at the little
scene, his eyes locked on them as though he daren’t look around and
catch anyone’s eye.
“That’s great, Dad. Really. But, a couple of thousand, it’s a drop in the
ocean.”
A scrawny kid in a pair of tracksuit bottoms almost rode his bike into the
pram. You shouldn’t be on your bike in the park, the women said, her
face full of contempt. The kid told her to fuck off. Several of his mates
came round the corner of the Observatory, also on bikes. The woman
looked indignantly at her life-partner for help. Do something. Are you
going to let them talk to me like this?
I turned back to the great clear dome of blue sky, the sweep of grass, the
white stone, the glinting steel and glass. “We’re talking, a flat round here,
two bedrooms, in a nice bit of Greenwich, were talking two hundred and
fifty thousand, something like that. That’s an ex-Council flat, dad. You
know. It’s just unattainable.”
“So how does someone on your income afford a place to live,” he asked.
He still hasn’t grasped certain things. Certain new realities.
“Well, they just don’t. Look, our joint income is a little over thirty
thousand a year.”
“You don’t need to tell me what you earn, son. None of my business.”

“No, no I know,” I said, I leant toward him. “But to give you some idea.” I
wanted him to understand. “Even if we got a mortgage for five times our
joint income, we’d be in a one bedroom flat up in Thamesmead, and it
would still be a big chunk of money every month, plus traveling all the
way in for work.” I let my voice trail off. “You know, we missed the boat.
Maybe six, seven years ago, but then we’d only just met. So, we’re going
to have to rent for a while.”

He breathed out heavily and raised his eyebrows. “I can’t understand it,”
he said. It used to be they gave you three times your income. What they
lent you was dependent on what you could pay back…”
“Well there are a lot of rich people in this city, dad,” I said. “A lot of
people on millions of pounds worth of bonuses, buying up property.”
“Not all of them are millionaires. What about the people you work with.”
I paused for a moment.
“Well, lots of them are from middle class families, Mummy and Daddy
had a substantial enough nest egg to offer them as deposit. Maybe their
partners have got jobs that pay reasonable money.”
“Well, with kids you have to make choices. You have to make sacrifices. I
did a lot of nights in the yard. A lot of weekends.”
I know. My heart sank. I looked around, the HSBC building over there,
shining in the bright summer sunshine.
“Well hopefully when Andrea’s got her M.A. her income will go up. So
we’ll see. In a couple of years, who knows?”

There was a silence. We both knew it. We’re trapped. We’re fucked.
Something is casting its shadow over us. History. The certainty of defeat.
Who’d have thought that their kids would have to pay quarter of a
million pounds to live on a council estate, the place you got a trade and
saved your money up to escape from. Defeat. I’ve had the taste of it in my
mouth since I was born. So has he. Why not just give in, better to go back
to luxuriating in drink, to making life as small as possible, work, telly, the
pub, than set yourself up for this. He couldn’t have known the world he
was sending his kids out into. How much did 1970 look like 1980, or
1990, 2000. And when will all this come tumbling down around our ears?
Never? Well. That’s the basis we have to work on for now.

We stood there silently, lost in thought, the still, small centre of all that
activity and noise. Are we a lost generation, the working class kids that
grew up into the mid-eighties when all the walls were coming down,
when the class they belonged to was being dismantled, when the final
victory was being declared? The working class. Even the term feels
wrong, archaic, outmoded, a relic. The kids on bikes were going down
the path from the observatory now at full pelt, shouting, other park-goers
jumping out of their way. We were disoriented, reeling, scattered. Didn’t
we use to be the heroes of History, dad, its engine, I want to ask him,
before suddenly we were its dead weight? Weren’t we supposed to be the
corrective before suddenly we were the ones who were being corrected?
The rug gets pulled out from under your feet and sets you stumbling, by
the time you realise what’s happened the best part of twenty years has
passed, all your youth gone.

And then my mum and Andrea were back with us, Andrea smiling. I
relaxed a little seeing that she was in a good mood. My moods are
calibrated to hers.(5) She likes my mum, sees her as a good women, sweet
and loving who’s had to tolerate a lot of indifference and being
condescended to. She thinks I should pay more attention to her instead of
all the endless arguing I do with my Dad . On an impulse I hugged them
both and kissed my mum on the head. She let out a surprised laugh.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I said. Let’s forget the future, just for a moment.
And for a moment I almost can, but my dad is still standing at my back
gazing grimly out across the river as if to say: you’ve already forgotten too
much of it.

Andrea has gone to bed early after a tense evening in which I found it
hard to concentrate on what she was telling me.
 I’m tired from having stayed up late for the past few nights writing. I
can’t sleep properly when I finally do go to bed, my mind awash with all
kinds of things, memories that fill me full of dread surfacing, wild,
exultant flights of fantasy about how our lives will be when all this is
resolved that have my heart pounding.

We washed the pots together in silence then I came in here to work and
couldn’t, simply couldn’t, just sat here, looking at the screen my mind a
mess of fog and static, my eyes smarting.

All couples argue, it’s normal.

After twenty minutes or so I told myself to go out for a walk to try and
get the ideas flowing, but really I knew where I was heading from the
start. Even so, I took the most circuitous route to the off-license(6),
where I bought a can of Stella and a packet of extra strong mints in the
vain hope that they would take it off my breath. I gulped it down
quickly, guiltily in the little back street filled with weeds and rubbish
bags behind the pizza place next door.

Chilled to perfection. It went straight to my head, that old familiar surge,

the summer moon above me. Hello old friend, old adversary, old curse,
old consolation.

Then I went back to buy another, the shopkeeper barely looking up from
his newspaper at me. I was already drunk. I bought a can of Special Brew
and even through the clouding of the first can I felt a pang of remorse.
This can I smuggled back to the house, my head thumping as I came
cautiously up the stairs in case Andrea was up and about, shuffling
around in the kitchen unable to sleep, but the house was quiet. I closed
the study door gently behind me and sat down to write, easing the can
open, a crack and a wisp of mist, began sipping at it as I gazed out of the
window, watched a fox pad around on the roof of the lockups on the
other side of the road, its head hanging lazily, jaw lolling open. They get
bolder and bolder everyday. Perhaps they know that we won’t be around
for much longer.

I have been sitting here for a while then, still unable to write. Before I go
up to bed I’ll make sure I take this can downstairs and put in the wheelie
bin. Then I’ll have to clean my teeth and swill down plenty of
mouthwash. Perhaps I should just sleep here. There’s a space I can fit into
along the wall opposite the desk if I shift a few boxes across. I can use the
half full laundry bag for a pillow, there’s a sleeping bag in here
somewhere. She probably won’t even notice, whereas if I go to bed
stinking of booze I’ll probably wake her up, she’ll smell it on me and that
will cause trouble.

I shouldn’t have had that drink, it has done nothing for me and now I
have to sleep on the floor. Tomorrow I’ll be tired again. Perhaps I can
find some way of writing in my sleep.
I mustn’t get back into drinking again and I have resolved not to. It is a
part of my past and something I have left behind, in Spain. When we
moved to London my lifestyle, or at least my habits, changed around a
lot.(7)
In Barcelona I spent a lot of time in bars and had re-awakened a little by
that stage. There was something about the culture, the weather, the
attitude to life there that brought me some way out of myself, perhaps it
was simply the passage of time, but either way I began to re-engage. I
lived with a couple of Irish guys fresh out of University who liked to talk
and drink and I began to think about some of those things I had been
passionate about again, writing, politics, philosophy, art, in the limited
way I understood any of them. Andrea was much more indulgent of my
drinking and my friendships then and was more outgoing herself, more
caught up in the spirit of the place. And if neither of us was exactly
young, we were at least younger.
London, I think, depressed us both. Where is the life in London, where
are its public spaces, where is the ease and conviviality? Everyone
hurrying past each other in the rain, everyone on the defensive,
everyone, heads down, endlessly buying. But of course we ended up in
London for the same reason most people do, because there is work here.
And then we were in the work trap, all the jobs are in London so
everyone wants to be here. There’s a lot of demand for housing so prices
are high, you have to share, so you have no money now, and no real
privacy. There are a million things to do, but in order to have the money
to do them, to enjoy all that the city has to offer you need some
disposable income, for which you either have to work more hours,
meaning you have less free time to do the things you want, or you have
to spend money you don’t have. Most people seem to have gone for the
latter but we wouldn’t. We decided to live within our means.
We only really got married for the sake of convenience, we had to for
Andrea to be able to stay here long term. We told ourselves that we were
the kind of people who didn’t believe in marriage and that it was purely
for practical reasons, but somehow, marriage sneaks up on you. Before
you know it you’re trying to plan a future, discussing where you’ll be six
or seven years from now. Now you have a distinct life, a certain set of
possibilities and aspirations that you bend your will and focus, all your
effort into bringing into being.
Children are hard work, but worth every moment of it, is another one of
the things they tell me. Why is everyone so obsessed with hard work?
Andrea too, increasingly. Work was always what I thought an intelligent
man spent his life avoiding. And what I do can hardly be called work at
all. Teaching English is, as everyone knows, a default occupation, it’s
largely what you do if you have no other clear aim or simply aren’t
interested in status or money. I can deal with words, which have always
been my main interest and ideas, to a limited degree, my colleagues are
generally sympathetic, the students generally pleasant. But this mild
general pleasantness isn’t enough to really live on, to have that you will
be expected to suffer more.
I suspect that the worst thing you can be seen to do at this stage is coast,
to take easy, reasonably satisfying work and then drift. One must strive
and struggle to better oneself. But how does one better oneself? Often
when I discuss this with Andrea I tell her that I’ve never read the works
of Montaigne, or learned classical Greek and while she agrees that these
are certainly ways in which a person can and should enrich himself she
also knows that I’m unlikely to do either of these things and suggests I
would be better off using my time to study something practical. Do an
MA in something career-related, just like all the world does, in order to
get that competitive edge. But I don’t want to work or compete, I never
did. I just want out.(8)
She would like me I think to change jobs. To knuckle down and spend
less time daydreaming listening to music.
Actually, to say that I always just wanted out is not exactly true. In some
wild, half-permissible flight of fantasy, I want a permanent
rearrangement of social relations. I want to be swept up in some huge
collective endevour and greet my fellow men as brothers. But of the two,
getting out is the most realistic.

Lying in bed last night something like the old anxiety got hold of me, a
nameless, non-specific dread. Something began to whisper to me in the
dark. Dread of life, of my incompatibility with everything, of the
deformity that sits in my heart, my basic wrongness.
Soon I will be a father. I can imagine the life forming inside her, this tiny
speck of bright matter spinning in the vast ocean of her womb, being
summoned out of nothing.
Soon I will be a father, yet how can I become one, when I believe in
nothing. I have nothing to teach, no wisdom to impart. I can hardly
discipline myself, how can I discipline anyone else? How dare I? A child,
my child.
Can I stand to see all that potential infected by my doubt, fear and
weakness?
If we can get out, if we can just not work, not worry about money then
perhaps I can be, not a father exactly, but a parent at least. Have enough
left over of myself to offer love and hope to others. I don’t want to give
my child over to this world, I fear seeing him taken by the world and
then returned to me more stained and distorted everyday. He’ll be
greedy, materialistic demanding, an imperious little consumer shaking his
fists as we creep around him. I‘ve seen them, in the supermarkets, in the
parks and cafes. Those nice, middle class parents and their wonderful
kids. The tension is terrible, the parents faces masks of suppressed
hysteria, the kids lawless and tyrannical, everybody’s nerves cranked up
to snapping point as they have a nice, family day out. Is that how it will
be for us? Is that who we’ll become?

But what else would we have done with our lives? Sit there in a house
we’ll have to work all our lives to buy, watching each other get old and
with no one to leave it to.
Why have I made such bad choices? Why did I delay so long in coming
to some kind of an accommodation with things? I see those families out
strolling in their Gap clothes, pushing their big, armoured buggies around
Greenwich Park, and I hate them. Perhaps I just envy them, envy them
their certainty. All I do is oscillate. Talk myself into and talk myself out
of every single thing, the whole idea unlacing even as I tie it all together.
If only I could stop all this endless, inconclusive talking. If only it were
all transparently and self-evidently as it should be, if only I could be in
love with reality, as they are.

Somehow she must have sensed it, the way I held myself rigid, the waves
of tension coming of me, something in my breathing, my eyes searching
the walls and ceiling. How many nights have I lain awake like this, lost,
small, drowned in the darkness dizzy with the momentum. I’m growing
older and still I have nothing solid to hold onto.

Out of nowhere she put her hand on my back, her small hot hand on my
knotted back, under the covers and suddenly I was flooded with relief.

“Shhh,” she said sleepily “Shh. It’s ok”.

Thank you, I almost said. I gritted my teeth. I am loved. I rolled over and
kissed her plump, pillow-creased cheek, breathed her in, put my hand up
to the soft swell of her belly, our child there in its thick, warm cave. She
reached up to stroke my face. Still more asleep than awake, half in a
dream. I am loved. Miraculously, ridiculously, despite it all, I am loved.

Her hand on my back, restoring the world to me. These are the small
things that save you. I will give this child as much as I can give it.

There is no perfect world, only this one, always teetering on the brink,
always in need of rescue.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Andy.(9)

It’s inevitable I suppose as I’m writing about him, though before I started
this he hadn’t crossed my mind in years. I don’t know exactly how old he
was but he must have been around about the age I am now when we met,
perhaps a few years older. He’ll be in his early fifties if he’s still alive.
Perhaps he succumbed to drink, perhaps he left the life he was unhappy
with and did something bold and unpredictable with it, perhaps get
through the caution that age brings on and seized the best of life he
could.

Probably he just suffered on through it out a sense of duty and consoled

himself with drink and fantasy. I remember that he developed stupid
crushes on girls who worked across in the main building,. He knew they
were stupid but he was prey to them anyway, and besides, their stupidity
didn’t stop them being consoling. He used to impute all kind of qualities
to those girls. There was one, Dawn, a bland, mousy twenty-year old who
he developed a bit of a strange fixation on rhapsodizing her qualities, her
intelligence her purity, her good manners. She was quiet and dressed
down compared to most of the girls who worked across in the Factory.
He recognized himself in her, I suppose, imagined that she would
understand him.

It must have been hard for him when the revelations about Robert
Hanson came out. Probably he left the area. It’s hard to imagine anyone
wanting to stay there, any close family members, with that degree of
adverse publicity. For my first few months in Prague I would go into a
cold sweat imagining him being grilled by the police about his
connection with his brother and telling them all about me, that at any
moment there would be a knock on the door or the hand on the shoulder
that Charlie had felt in that greasy spoon in South London.

I should contact him, tell him that I’m finally writing that book we both
always knew we had in us. I should find out exactly what happened, he
would be a good source of information for me. I should try to explain too,
why after I left his place, during those few, long months I stayed in
Castleford I never contacted him, although I don’t know if I can give him
any really satisfactory explanation.

I do owe him thanks and an apology but it was long time ago that we
were friends, it’s been ten years and life for better or worse has taken me
out of the narrow band of experiences and attitudes we shared then. He’d
view me as middle-class now. I’ve traveled, I have a foreign wife, I teach,
I speak another language reasonably well. He‘s almost certain to be filled
with animosity, drinkers always end up bitter, they are never pleased for
anyone who gets straight, sorts their lives out.

I wonder if I am starting to follow the same path he took. Not in respect

to the girls, I haven’t started developing any crushes on my students yet,
though I can’t deny I have looked on a couple of them with lust over the
years.

The ways in which I seem to be following in his footsteps is in the way

I’m obsessively listening to music from my teens and early twenties. I’ve
been downloading lots of stuff that I used to listen to at the time, records
that I never bought but which always seemed to be around. I have always
been interested in music, though I don’t play any instruments and when
we row about money, which all couples do, it’s usually over my
expenditure on cds, most of which, Andrea tells me, I buy and then never
get round to listening to and which take up, if not shelf space, then at
least floor space. These days I can listen to a much broader range of
things but back then it w as mostly angry guitar music, Rave passed me
by, in fact I hated it. Suddenly the guys who had wanted to beat me up at
school two years before for being a weirdo or a junkie, or knowing a
handful of words were smoking spliffs and calling me mate. But those
people weren’t my friends, nor did I want to celebrate the fact that they’d
discovered drugs and dancing and that this was compatible with football,
horrible clothes and not reading books. I wanted music that spoke of
alienation, refusal and change. And it seems I still do.

The moment Andrea comes in, I turn it off as I know it will just cause a
row. She’s not going to listen to Black Flag or the Birthday Party or
Swans and I’m surprised to find that I still do want to hear them after
years of listening to a much greater diversity of stuff. It saddens me in a
way, makes me wonder if I have really progressed or whether I’ll forever
stubbornly be that angry seventeen year old boy. It was as though my
rage at that point was so great that it fused something in me, stopped a
part of me developing. I’m sure we all carry that younger self around in
us, indulge him occasionally, but in me he seems to be strengthening as
the years go by.
One of the consequences of my mum and dad having come to stay for a
few days is that I’ve got my book back.

I sent it home for safekeeping almost as soon as I arrived in Prague and

then forgot all about it for the best part of ten years until I came to write
this.

It could have got me killed going back for it. Could it possibly have been
worth it? Why did I go up the stairs? It’s hard for me to say exactly,
except that at that point almost everything that was in me had been
decanted onto its pages. I was reclaiming myself. Not for immediate use
perhaps but saving what I was then for later, for a moment like now, for
this endeavour. For a moment of reckoning, perhaps. For a moment of
liberation.

I like the idea that a relic from the past appearing again in my life like
this will have some profound effect on our future.

Has everything I’ve done in the past ten years just been a way of filling
in time until I can open this book again? I turned it over in my hands. It
was smooth, black, beautiful. I pressed it against my face. It was cool,
even though the night was stifling, as though it were made from some
alien material. Nervously I opened it and flicked though several pages
quickly, not focusing on anything in particular, feeling as though my
younger self were in there sitting in silent judgment, then closed it and
set it down beside the computer again.
I lacked courage. Now I’m trying to write about the Hansons I need that
more than ever.

I need a drink, I need a drink, I need a drink a small insistent voice was
saying to me. It was ten thirty, still time for me to get to the off license.
I’ll have to spend another night on the floor, but given that I can’t sleep
anyway, what difference will it make? I told myself that I should be
writing, all I have is a mess of fragments that need to cohere somehow
into a whole. Scrolling back through them I got depressed. I still have a
few months to get more stuff down and then shape it all. If I start
drinking now I’ll never get anything done, again.

I knew this absolutely, understood how important it was that I got

something down, that it wasn’t yet another wasted night but nonetheless
I found myself leaving the house and again heading off in the opposite
direction to the off-license before doubling back a few streets away,
trying to fool whoever might be watching me, trying to fool myself
perhaps.(*)

I really mustn’t start drinking again I said to myself over and over as I
walked into the shop and bought three cans of special brew.

I’d drunk one of them before I got back to the house. I put it in the blue
wheelie bin, then eased my key into the lock.

Back in the study, instead of turning to the keyboard I opened the book
and bent to it in the lamplight. Much of what I had written was illegible,
cramped, drunken scrawl, the book on my knee. It was urgently written.
I had been writing I suppose under terrible pressure. Perhaps that’s the
only way I can write. I scrutinised it more closely, flicked back a few
pages and found the writing was more legible. Probably these few pages
charted the progress of the evening from the moment I retired with a
bottle to the moment when the pen fell from my fingers.

I flipped forward again and found blank pages. The book was only half
full. I closed it. Perhaps there was nothing of any real interest in it. At the
time I had been obsessed by Krapp’s Last Tape. “Drowned in dreams and
burning to be gone.” All that stuff. I probably had some romantic idea
that I would be able to look back on this period from a safe distance in
the future and learn something about myself. I had a sense of anticlimax.
Just a book I scribbled drunken thoughts in when I was twenty six. My
great thoughts.

I sat with it in my hands, casting my mind back. Why had I reclaimed it,
why had I sent it away so quickly once I had escaped? Because it was
tainted in some way, toxic? Perhaps that part of me that was contained
within it was something I wished to banish. And yet I hadn’t simply
dropped it in a bin or burned it, I had sent it home, where I knew it
would be safe.

I opened the book in the middle. “A man must pass through himself,”
was the last thing I had written there, across the centre of the page in
block capitals. The facing page was blank. I thought back and had no
memory of having written this, though judging by its whereabouts in the
book I understood that it must have been written just before I left.
 Just before I left. A memory came back to me. Hadn’t I written it sitting
there on the bed just as Charlie called up the stairs? Surely at that crucial
moment I wouldn’t have paused to scribble this down? Yet I could see
myself crouched down writing, responding with a shout as I wrote the
last word or two, hearing Charlie and Robert Hanson’s footsteps on the
stair. And then?

I must be misremembering things. I opened another can with a sense of

deep contentment that there was still yet another left should I choose to
drink it. I turned the book over and opened it up. I will use it to write
notes in, I can carry it about with me just like I used to, dip into it now
and then when I need to get inspiration with regard to the psychology of
my younger self and so on. I settled into position hunched over the book
on my knee, a black biro in my fist, an open can beside me on the table
and began to write just as I used to. Don’t think too much just let it flow.

There are certain things I can only tell this book. This book has been my
only true friend. There’s a terrible loneliness in that but a kind of cold,
deep freedom. Thank god for the salvation of a blank page.

But now I’m drunk and getting sentimental.

Andrea’s changed too over the past few years in the passage from being
twenty five to thirty. It seems to me that she used to like people much
more, used to be more sociable

When we first met she was living hand to mouth in Barcelona, working
in bars and committed to the street life there, the whole floating retinue
of European dropouts and South American escapees that swarmed
through the streets in the centre. She lived in some run down, chaotic
parts of town at that point and like everyone else including me shared in
a kind of unspoken agreement to collectively pool all our limited
resources, someone had some money to buy cheap bottles of wine,
someone had a bit of floor space you could crash on till you found a
room, someone else had just made a big bowl of pasta, someone had just
found a job so you could go to the bar they were working in for a free
slice of pizza, people had guitars or a stereo and some drugs so some
square became an ad hoc venue or disco.

It was something I was used to from my student days and all that time on
the dole in Leeds but already I felt a little too old at thirty to be doing it
for too much longer. When I looked at some of the people there, self-
styled painters or writers or artists, well into their Forties and still living
out the fantasy that they were destined to make a difference, that their
mere existence was some form of criticism, I knew there wasn’t much
dignity and a lot of self-deception in that. Just another dead end.

Andrea is bright and diligent and she wanted something more serious
finally.

Almost as soon as we came to England she started getting scrupulous

about tidiness and order. I’m not naturally fastidious, I can live in any
amount of heaped rubbish without it bothering me. It was as though the
tiniest speck of disorder invading our lives would have meant the whole
thing unraveling. What she wanted was coherence, direction, a
purposeful existence.
Five years ago she wouldn’t have cared about the way we’re living now,
about the relatively unfurnished flat we’re in, with its cheap Argos
furniture and its piles of books and cds but I know that now the baby’s on
its way disorder affects her mood even more. She wants everything spick
and span and if I didn’t object or make excuses she’d have me hovering
the house everyday, scrubbing every last inch of the bath and the kitchen
floor.

I shouldn’t be surprised but still I am a little, there is a tiny part of me

that feels as though it’s been swindled, that this isn’t what I signed up for.
But then I always knew how it was. I used to laugh about it, the way that
all the square, dull worthy guys the sexy girls wouldn’t look at when we
were at university because they wanted a chaotic, drunken, romantic
intellectual type all got their chances eight, nine years down the line
when it was baby time and they were stockbrokers or financial advisors
and wonderfully stolid, dull providers.

So I know, I know, but still. I had imagined that Andrea was different.
She is in many ways. Just as I suppose that I’m both different from and
identical to the general run of humanity in similar ways myself.
All this came home to me yesterday going out to buy Andrea some
maternity clothes. We went to look in a shop opposite Greenwich market
that specializes in organic products, including baby clothes but the prices
were ridiculous and we left almost immediately. I was looking forward to
getting back to the flat to try and use Saturday morning as time to do
some writing but Andrea decided she wanted to go to the Mothercare in
Canary Wharf. We can look at prams too, she said.

There didn’t seem to be any need to look at prams yet and besides I
wasn’t even sure there was a Mothercare in Canary Wharf. Wouldn’t we
be better of just going home and doing it another day?

“What are you going to do when we get home?” Andrea asked.

“Disappear into your study?”
 We were standing in front of the precinct that goes down to the DLR.
Andrea has taken to standing with her hands protectively out in front of
her belly these days, her eyes darting about, hyper-vigilant, certain some
calamity is going to occur.

“Canary Wharf will be packed on a Saturday. There’ll be loads of people.”

She saw through my strategy immediately. “Well, I’m sure I’ll be ok with
you there to protect me.” (10)

For a moment it was in my mind to dig my heels in, I hate Canary Wharf
and everything it stands for, but then so does she. On another day I
wouldn’t have relented and there would have been a fight. But then on
yet another I would happily have gone with her from the off. Why any
one day is like another, why certain things happen and others don’t
seems arbitrary, the results of caprice, moods form, thoughts bunch and
disperse, attitudes come and go, so many scraps of cloud driven across the
sky.

I remembered rocking back on the splintered wooden chair in the

Hanson’s overgrown garden, watching the clouds, drunk. We’re just so
much flotsam and jetsam, washed back and forth inside ourselves,
dragged this way and that in the world.

No that’s the wrong way to think about it, we can control things to a
degree, learn to control ourselves at least, go against our worse impulses.
It’s not a boast to say that in many ways I have done this, and done it for
and because of Andrea.
And so we went to Canary Wharf. I struggled a little as we waited for the
train and then decided to let it go, just to accept that today I wasn’t going
to get any writing done. Instantly my mood lightened and Andrea was
happy too that we hadn’t had to argue over it, took my hand as we stood
on the platform then nestled into me. We chuckled at the difference in
our heights in the window when the train pulled in. I am at least a foot
taller than her but most of the time we don’t even notice it.

On the way there we chatted about the years she’d spent teaching
executives Spanish in Canary Wharf. A horrible experience, the people
utterly dull and robotic, dead-eyed, starved of any of any of the attribute
that make the company of another human being a pleasure. She told me
familiar tales of their stupidity and barely repressed rage, their
pricklyness at being corrected, the condescencion to her, a mere teacher,
their meanness. The group of lawyers w ho at the end of the term insisted
on splitting the bill five ways in some sub-standard but lavishly
appointed Tapas place in London Bridge when Andrea, starving, had
barely eaten anything hoping to keep her own expenditure down.
Inconceivable anywhere else, among any other group of people that they
just wouldn’t all pay for your meal as a sign of gratitude at the end of the
course, especially if they were on three, four times your salary, let alone
watch you eat a salad and sip water then allow you to subsidize their
meal. Surely there is no-one whose heart is more cramped and
calculating, whose purse strings are more tightly drawn than the English
middle classes’.

“Why do you want me to work there then?” I asked..

“What do you mean? I don’t want you to work there.”

“You want me to get a better job though.”

“I just think it might be a good idea to try and do something else.”

“Something corporate? Would you do it?”

“If I have to I will.”

“But I’m the one who’ll be trotting off first, is that the scenario?”

She opened her mouth to say something jokey, not wanting to spoil the
mood, but I wasn’t going to pursue it anyway. Besides, the fact that I was
going to write this book and get her what she wanted was tickling away
at me. I folded my own arms across my stomach in satisfaction and
grinned.

“We wouldn’t last five minutes in there either of us,” I said, nodding
towards the HSBC tower, all that impregnable sun-dazzled glass and
steel, as we came round the long, tilting curve that leads into Canary
Wharf station. I leant into her, rocking with the movement of the train,
and whispered in her ear.

“He doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonourable graves.”

Andrea smirked at me. Back to my old trick of quoting things at her. One
of the reasons, it occurs to me, that I stopped quoting so much, that I’ve
forgotten half the quotes I used to know is that it has always annoyed
her. She thought I should have been coming up with something of my
own instead.

“Shakespeare,” I told her. “You’ve heard of him, right?”

“Esh a kez pay are,” she said in an exaggerated Spanish accent, her head
questioningly to one side. “I no know, what is?”

We went around Mothercare and looked at prams and Andrea

predictably decided that everything was too expensive and that maybe
she could get her mum to send her something over from Argentina which
would be of better quality than this stuff anyway. I told her that it was a
lot of trouble to go to and maybe she should just get it here if she needed
it.
“Why not?” she said distantly. “It’s not as though we did anything special
when we got married.”

I was taken aback. “You didn’t want anything traditional.” I told her.
“You knew it was just a paperwork thing. You don’t believe in marriage
and all that Big Wedding, Princess-for-the-day bullshit. Do you?”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I’m just saying. It could have been a bit more
glamorous. Lewisham Registry Office.” She raised her hand up off her
belly in protest.

A long ache went through me, came up from deep behind my gut and
bruised me between the ribs. I looked at her for a long time as she gazed
covetously at a big expensive pram on the other side of the store. “What?”
she asked, turning to look at me, a bit flustered.

“Did you want a proper wedding?” I asked. “White dress, all that stuff. A
Special Day?”

“No, No. Something more than we had might have been nice, that’s all
I’m saying.”

My god. She wanted it after all, the traditional thing, with the handsome
groom and the dress, confetti in the air and the whole world celebrating
her having found love. She nurtured that fantasy even as she lived in
denial of it. Even as she sabotaged herself and held herself off, chose the
man who was least likely to grant her access to it.

Then another pang went through me, cold, jaw-tightening. Have we used
each other to hold ourselves away from what we can’t bear wanting?

Which parts of myself have I sabotaged in turn, and in whose name?

I’ve fallen behind as I haven’t written anything for a few weeks and
trying to get back into it last night, sitting here in the study once Andrea
had gone up the stairs to bed I almost immediately felt the desire just to
give everything up.

In fact the writing I have been doing has been going into my old
notebook. Instead of getting on with the story I should be writing, the
useful one, the one that might make me some money, it seems that I’m
much more interested, really, in figuring out my present than in recalling
my past. I know that there’s no clear distinction between the two but I
seem to be more intent on questioning what larger considerations have
brought me to this stage rather than worrying too precisely about the
details of my time at the Hansons. Again, perhaps I’m in that situation
where what I think I need and what I think I want to do seem not to be
what I really want and need. I am supposed to be writing one thing and
am writing another. I’m supposed to be using my time practically and
instead I’m indulging in introspection.

If Andrea did know what I was doing in here she would feel I was
wasting my time, in a way I am. The story I was so enthused by at the
start seems to have stalled around the time I moved to the Hansons’, and
even up to then it’s incoherent, scraps and patches, a series of extended
notes. It seems that something else is pressing through my thoughts and
shifting them away from their target. Something else wants to be
expressed, something that perhaps this whole idea of writing about the
Hanson’s was merely a cover for.
Or again, perhaps I’m simply avoiding writing about Jessica Hanson. And
yet I cannot if I want to have any chance of success(11).

But it was more than just the feeling that I’d never finish in time, I have
probably about three months left to get it all done, more that looking
back over what I’d written I was sure that no-one would want to read it
and I wondered why I’d spent so much time on details of my childhood
and my past. I disliked the way I started, I disliked everything.

I spent most of the time arguing with myself while taking nips from a
little hip flask that I filled with vodka at work, brought home in my bag
and hid down by the desk. The old questions I thought I’d got away from.
Why don’t I know yet who I am? Why am I pitted against myself like
this? Why can’t I ever see anything through to its conclusion. I spent a
few hours twisting in my chair and trying to get something down, but I
was tired. After a while I was just drinking and gazing out at the train
station, my vision blurry.

When I did finally lower myself onto the inflatable mattress and bunch
up some towels under my head I couldn’t sleep. I’ve taken to staying
down here more or less permanently at the moment, Andrea is sleeping
badly as it is because of the baby and my constant tossing and turning
keeps her awake. She tells me I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep, an
old habit I thought I had got out of
I’ve also been kept away from writing because a couple of old friends
turned up in London last week. Plus, Summer is always the busiest time
of year for us work-wise, the most exhausting, a whole flotilla of bored,
spoiled, hungover European teenagers to keep entertained.

Those old friends re-appeared via an e-mail through one of the

networking sites that students are always pestering you to sign up to so
they can stay in touch once they go back home. Perhaps we’re all going
through the same set of reflections on the past. I suppose at some point
when you have more past behind you than future ahead of you your
vision bends back. Here I am, marooned in my life, now how did I get
here. I shouldn’t say marooned, becalmed maybe, or maybe grounded
finally for a lot of people. Grounded pretty much for me too: when will
there not be doubts and dissatisfaction? It’s about balance, holding
everything in reasonable alignment.

A week later coincidentally, both of them were in London and so we

arranged to meet up. They were surprised by how much hair I’d lost. I
used to have a lot. We were all surprised by how much difference ten
plus years had made to our faces. Brendan had developed a belly, Ashley
had gone grey, but both of them had turned out how you might have
expected: one had never married and making a comfortable living as a
translator in the Czech republic, the country he’d decided to stay in the
other was rich, worked in some incomprehensible sales capacity for a
Biotechnology firm and was in the process of getting divorced.

We met in the centre of town. At first I was the only one not drinking or
smoking, which made them laugh as I was the one who’d always drunk
the most. It seemed I was a reformed character, sober, settled, expecting
my first child and they mocked me for it. In the end I gave in to their
bullying, had a pint, then another. We began to drink wine with the
meal, a bottle that turned into two, then a couple of whiskies to finish
off.

The conversation mostly ran around women and our disappointments. At

University we had prized ourselves on our candour and the rigour with
which we investigated each other’s motives, hunted down each other’s
contradictions. We soon slipped back into it, after a few drinks the initial
stiffness and the intervening years meant nothing. It seems people believe
that the way you were with them, what you did and felt, thought,
believed when you knew them is the truth of you, is the real, the
authentic self. No amount of protest or justification will convince them
otherwise.(13)

Brendan stayed in town for a few days while Ashley went back to his
parents’ place in Coventry. He was up on business of some kind and we
saw each other once more, his chin smarting form a morning shave, his
eyes grey and crepe-like, a double in his hand at four thirty in the Hotel
bar. He was his usual bluff self, still driven to succeed, still with no other
means of measuring success than in material terms, sceptical about my
claims to be contented with my relative impoverishment, with my
anonymity. His scepticism was partly justified, I suppose, given what I’ve
embarked on.

What surprised me more than anything, what touched me was the

discovery that he’d had so much faith in me when we were younger.

“What was that poem you used to quote?” he asked. “The famous one,
the Larkin one, “ get out while you still can, and don’t have any kids
yourself…”

He was looking at me intently. “I always thought you were going to

make it somewhere the rest of us couldn’t get to. I thought you were
going to blaze out, live fast, die young, leave something brilliant behind.
All that stuff. We were all kind of rooting for you mate, you know.” He
allowed himself a sentimental smile.

I had a swallow of the whiskey he’d pressed on me. “Well,” I said, “too
late for that now. Anyway. You’re faith was misplaced.”
Rooting for me. I leant against the bar.

“I was fucking useless, I didn’t have a clue y’know. It was all bluffing
really.” It was early to be drinking. Five O’clock. I looked around the
empty hotel bar. I wanted to ask him; what was I like, who was I then?
Thinking back to those years is like looking into the memories of a
stranger who happened to occupy my place at the time.

For some reason the question went unasked. “Going to be a Daddy eh?”
he asked, eyebrows raised. “Ran out of imagination then, did you?”

Perhaps, I wanted to say. Perhaps if I had got away that day I would have
been someone, perhaps I would have bent myself to producing something
great, who knows what uses the world might have put me to, who I
might have met, what I might have become. That one punch in the face,
the first time I had ever been hit. The Universe folded in on itself and all
number of possible future selves, worlds, were lost to me and I was given
this one, a world I’ve struggled through and have made something out of
at last. Even if to some others it seems like the safest, most conservative
choice of all, it has taken me years to get there, to accept the necessity of
things that once I scorned and abjured, being a father, a husband.

If not for that punch in the face. If I hadn’t gone back that day. If I had
never left Rachael. If I had just swallowed my pride and gone home. If
not for the million tiny incidents and slippages that lead me on to that
moment.
“You used to be good looking,” he said.” I thought you were going to be a
star.” He was gazing out of the big sun bleached windows to the road, life
rushing past, always rushing past too quickly for anyone to catch it and I
realised that in some ways he was really talking about himself. Life, I was
about to say, is just long stretches of sleepwalking interrupted by bursts of
panic. Don’t worry you’ll soon sing yourself back to sleep again. And so
will I.

Later, on the floor in the study I went over the conversation in my mind,
my heart fluttering guiltily. I hadn’t been completely wrong then.
Dreams that I had nurtured throughout my adolescence crowded back in
on me. I had had something when I was younger, some charisma, some
special quality that people recognized. Perhaps I could exploit it yet.
Perhaps I still can.

No, I will. I felt a fresh sense of resolve. And if Andrea can’t accept it
finally, can’t trust me enough to give me the time and space then well,
we will have to have conflict.
And yet, again today I felt ridiculous.

One of my colleagues was talking enviously about his brother before the
morning classes. He is thirty-seven, my age, made a killing on buy-to-let
and has retired now, gone off to live in Greece with his wife and two
kids. No more English grey and daily servitude for him.

I pooh-poohed the whole idea but inside me there was a kind of envy and
despair. This was a man who was competent to understand life, to take
hold of it. I imagined somehow that his wife and children must venerate
him. Look at what he’s done for them, for himself.

No doubt he had help, in fact I know he did, my workmate comes from a

wealthy family, he himself is the dropout, the black sheep, the guy whose
scraping by like I am on the one hand, but who still has a lifeline on the
other. Rich dad, rich brother, to whom ten, twenty thousand are a
trifling sum anyway, and almost certainly if it’s going to be in bricks and
mortar, a good enough investment.

Why have I made such bad choices? Why can’t I convince myself that I
was right to have made the choices I have? It seems that now I have
committed myself firmly to a particular life, all the years before that
appear to have been nothing but waste. Irrespective of how shaken I was
by my experience at the Hanson’s, the mere fact that I ended up there in
the first place tells me something. Can it be that for all those years I was
wrong and they were right? I don’t want to have spent my life being
wrong and now to have to play some humiliating game of catch up. But I
don’t have the luxury of only thinking about myself anymore.

These thoughts preoccupied me deeply during class, I felt the pressure of

them on the edge of my vision, thick, black lines hemming me in.
Afterward I had to go into the office to talk with my line manager Kate to
get feedback from a “class chat” she’d undertaken with my students the
day before, telling me they were concerned that I didn’t seem to be
giving the lessons my all, that I seemed poorly prepared and distracted,
simply seemed to be drilling them through exercise after exercise without
giving them much individual attention.
I’ve been wrong, I’ve been wrong, I’ve been wrong was the simple
thought that kept rotating round and round in my mind, blocking out all
other thoughts, making me feel sick.

“Is everything all right?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a bit under the weather.”

“Well, you need to address these issues,” she told me.

I nodded, took the piece of paper summarizing my deficiencies out of her

hand and left.

Walking home I resolved both to make more of an effort in my classes, to

commit to my writing more. I’ll go home now, do the best part of a day’s
work, make a nice dinner for Andrea, get up early and get into work with
enough time to prepare a decent lesson. I’ll be precisely that competent,
directed, driven figure I need to be, I’ll get us out of here but my means
will be different. I’ll write.

I went straight upstairs when I got in and turned on the computer.

During some preparatory fussing and reorganizing of the space around
the desk I found a can of beer from a few weeks ago that I had hidden
among my bedding. Three O’clock in the afternoon, Andrea not back till
ten.
I decided to get a quick bath. I took my notebook with me, I could
scribble things down in there, then type them up later. I took the beer
and lay there in the bath sipping it, the window open, blue sky and soft
breeze, the warm water and time growing hazy and distant. Soon life will
be all this.

I spent longer in there than I should have done. Early evening I had a
headache that another can of beer I bought from Tesco express only made
worse. By the time Andrea got back I was feeling fairly lousy. I had
cleaned my teeth and gargled Listerine several times but still somehow,
immediately, she smelled it on me.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“Oh I had a pint after work with some of the other teachers”, I said.
“Wish I hadn’t bothered. You’ve got a nose like a bloodhound,” I said,
with forced jollity

“You’re not going to start drinking again are you?” she asked. She had
folded her arms over her stomach and taken a step or two back.

I shook my head. “No way.”

“Don’t start drinking again,” she said. “Tell me you’re not going to start
drinking again.”

“I just did,” I said.

The note of panic in her voice was aggravating me. It was just a pint for
god’s sake.

“You know how you get when you drink, you’re unbearable,” she said
with bracing Latin directness.

“At least I’m not unbearable when I’m sober,” I told her with a sarcastic
smile.

“Meaning I am?”

“No, no, no, not at all,” I said with a weary air as I bent to get the
vegetarian Lasagne out of the oven.

“Because I’m not the one who gets depressed, I’m not the one who gets
paranoid and argumentative and attacks everyone around him.”

Suddenly she moved closer to me and reached out a hand, touched my

arm just above the elbow. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong,” she
said. “Please. I won’t be angry. I won’t judge you. I just want to know. I
just want to know you. Sometimes I feel like I’m living with a stranger.”

Perhaps you are, perhaps we all are. “There’s nothing wrong,” I said.
“And, honestly I’m not going to start drinking again.” I tried to smile
reassuringly.
Her eyes were searching my face. “Just tell me,” she said softly.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! What do you want me to say, do you want me to
invent something?”

“Are you having an affair?”

“What? No. Where did you get that from?”

“Then why don’t you want to spend time with me?”

“I’m trying to spend time with you now. We’re trying to have a nice
dinner together. And this is going cold I need to serve it.” I turned back
to the cheap yellow lasagna steaming in its half-melted plastic tray, the
burned garlic bread.

Silently I slopped everything onto two plates as Andrea got the knives
and forks out of the drawer.

“Why don’t you just take that and go and write or whatever it is you’re
doing in there,” she said.

“What I’m doing in there is writing,” I told her. “Writing.”

“Go and write then,” she said. “I’ll eat on my own.”

She tried to take the plate out of my hand but I kept a tight grip on it.

“No, let’s eat together,” I insisted. She struggled with the plate a little and
I could see her fury mounting. One cold, removed part of me was
determined to hold on to it, to watch her struggle to take it from me until
she burst into tears. After a few seconds I released it.

“Whatever you want.”

“What I want is for you to put those shelves up,” she said.

I laughed out loud. The eternal question of the shelves. “I’ll put them up!”
I said.

“When? When? When?” she asked me, her voice rising to a pitch. “Why
do I have to ask you to do everything a thousand times? Why is it only
when I get upset or shout at you that you take any notice of me?”

“I spend my life running round after your every little need,” I told her.
“You’re kidding me. You’re fucking kidding me.” I was waving my hand
around in front of her to signal that the conversation was over as I
stamped off into the study and slammed the door behind me, dropping
my own plate of lasagna and salad down on the desk.
 I could hear her crying in the kitchen but I was icy in my resolve. I leant
out of the window watching a group of kids playing five-aside with a
tennis ball.

It’s all gone wrong, it’s all gone wrong, it’s all gone wrong was the
sentence churning around in my mind now. This is what I’ve reduced
down to after all the years of trying to figure things out. A few stock
phrases.

It’ll be ok. It doesn’t matter anyway. This time I really will. It’s all gone
wrong.

After a few hours I snuck upstairs and curled up next to her on the bed
whispering I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry into her ear as she curled into
herself, her back to me, pretending to be asleep.
“When are you going to start doing up the room?” Andrea asked me
yesterday on the bus home “ I’m due September the 20th, you know.”

“Oh believe me, I know,” I said.

We were on our way back from an ante-natal class in Lewisham

“So that room needs to be done by mid-August really.”

“Mid-August? Three weeks away?”

“So you need to finish off whatever you’re doing in there.”

Again there was that sceptical tone in her voice about my writing.

“This should be your last week, really.”

I shook my head. “No, no, come on. Why does it have to be done by mid-
August?. That’s a month before the baby is even here.”

“Because it would give me peace of mind,” she said.

“But it would completely fuck up my writing.”

“Well you can write somewhere else.”

“Well the baby is going to sleep in our room for a few months anyway,
isn’t it?” I asked. “So why does it matter when it’s done?”

“Well it needs to be done before the baby is here.”

“Why?” I asked.
I didn’t want to argue on public transport but it was important to me that
I still had access to my study up to the last possible moment in order to be
able to get a substantial amount of work done.

“Because you’re treating it like a low priority.”

“Well, that’s irrelevant. What I’m asking is: why does it matter if it’s done
a month before the baby arrives when we won’t even use it for another
four or five months?” Again I saw her as trying to punish me for being
interested in something other than her, doing her best to take away
something that was important to me and that was part of my private
domain. She wanted me to subordinate myself and the idea that she’d use
to justify this was that I had to learn to compromise.

I knew what she was about to imply to me, I could see it in her flushed
cheeks and her narrowed eyes: that I was a bad person, that I was
childish, that I had to learn to accept that I couldn’t always have my own
way, by which she meant that a good person is one who always defers to
his wife’s wishes, no matter how capricious they are.

“Why are you deliberately upsetting me, in my condition?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I see.” I kicked out my legs under the seat in front and
fumed. So now of course we have the pregnancy as an additional block on
any kind of rational discussion, another smokescreen, another tool for
manipulation. I wanted to say it out loud but instead I folded my arms
and sat glaring at the seat in front of me.
My insomnia has come back.

It went away for a while, for a coupe of months when we first began
living here alone. Before that, for a few years we lived in shared
accommodation, first in Lewisham as it was the cheapest place we could
find that was still reasonably close to good transport links. We occupied a
medium size room in a shared house. For the first six months, when
Andrea couldn’t work, we were really broke. It was a stressful
combination of circumstances, limited money, limited space, Andrea on
her own in the house all day not knowing anyone, bored and isolated, the
pressure of getting on with housemates. We stuck it out as long as we
could, three long years, because it was cheap and we could accumulate a
little money, then moved into a flat in Greenwich, with one of my ex-
colleagues, Barney, a pleasant slacker type who spent most of his time out
being pampered by his female students.

Eventually we moved here, initially to share the place with another ex-
flatmate from Lewisham, the only one we’d wanted to stay in touch with,
who bought a place somewhere over in Canary Wharf six months or so
ago. The first few months before Andrea got pregnant and I started
working on the book I slept well. The flat was affordable, large, quiet,
there were none of the omnipresent tensions and strains of cohabiting,
none of the arguing, between Andrea and I over how a particular
domestic issue with our housemate should be resolved. For a few months
it was honestly as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, all those
anxieties dissipated.

It was simple, we can live here in this half furnished flat, work, come
home to tranquility. By ten o’clock I could hardly keep my eyes open and
for a few months I slept deeply and blissfully, better than I have ever
slept. It was recuperative sleep, a sleep that some people are probably
always denied, their life is so endlessly freighted with worry.

There’s a particular desperation to insomnia, it’s as though you are

drowning in consciousness, a fish on the bank, desperate to get back
under the surface again, flipping this way and that with nothing but hard
ground beneath you. It was sweet to have those few months of good
sleep, but the respite didn’t last, the baby came along and put us back into
the world of worry.

When I consider how much we battled over our housemates I wonder

how much of a battleground the baby will be. How much it will
emphasise the differences between us. I think about the couple in the
park I saw that day a few months ago when my parents were here, but
not just them, the couples I see out and about everywhere.

They don’t look happy. If it’s all such a good idea, if it’s all so finally
worth it, why do they all look so sour, frustrated and miserable?
I must be wrong. No one would commit themselves to this so
systematically time and time again if it really were grim and painful. My
perspective on it must be wrong. I mentioned blithely to one of my work
colleagues that I realized that having children entailed making sacrifices.
She smiled beatifically at me. Except they’re not sacrifices she said. If
your child gains you don’t feel that you’ve lost out, you put them first,
there’s so much love there that the whole idea of sacrifice doesn’t come
into it. You live for them.

I nodded sagely. Is that healthy? Was what I wanted to ask her but she’s
easily upset and I had to be careful not to antagonize her.

Will I just be an appendage in what finally will be her life with her
children? Perhaps this isn’t so bad. After all, the question comes back to
me, what else is one supposed to do with their life? This will be maturity
at last I suppose, the adulthood I have delayed so long.

My dad got married and had kids late for a man of his generation and
background, he was twenty nine before he finally settled down. I know
he nurtured dreams of escape, from the town the job, from the life that
was mapped out for him, but instead of escaping it he simply delayed it
long enough to grow weary of his own inability to get out, I suppose. My
mum has told me that he dreamed of being a beachcomber and
emigrating to Australia. He’s told me himself of one day when he was
sixteen and just starting his apprenticeship, how he sat on the bus home
looking at the grey, worn out men smoking, lunch boxes clamped under
their arms sitting around him and thinking to himself, is this it then, is
this what I’ll be, sitting there one day in their place as some other sixteen
year old boy looks on me with the same sense of panic? I know his work
oppressed him, but finally his children were the great reason why he was
relieved of the burden of his own life, now he could transform his
cowardice into nobility and do it all for us.

I’d like to ask him if he regrets having had kids. I’d like to stop people in
the street and ask them, but this is the question you can never ask, and
certainly not ask yourself, I suppose. And really they should just ask
another question back at me. Why are you making such a big deal out of
it?

Why am I? Reconciliation, reconciliation be resigned to your life, focus

on its pleasures, accept its responsibilities, struggle to be good and
generous with your time and patience. This is what an adult does. I
know. Every Hollywood film tells me so. I feel my old self skulking
around inside me. I wish I could root him out. As I’m drifting in a half-
sleep, waiting to be pulled under I hear him whispering to me, words that
bring me round with a jolt, the hair on my arms standing up, leaving me
staring into the dark at the foot of the bed as though someone had been
lurking there muttering to themselves.

Going back to think about my time at the Hansons’ seems to have

intensified all this. The long agonizing stretches in which I lie with my
eyes closed trying everything I can think of, moderating my breathing,
trying to make my mind as empty as possible, turning my thoughts away
from anything troubling or anxiety inducing, desperate not to look at the
clock but looking at it anyway only to find it’s three now and if I get to
sleep by three thirty that’s five hours at least, not too bad. Then it’s three
thirty, then four and the boredom, discomfort and despair mounts until I
decide that tonight I’ll just skip sleep, I’ll get up, until at four fifteen or so
I doze off for a few thin hours that leave me more tired in the morning
than if I hadn’t slept at all.

I handle stress badly. I think in some ways my nervous system burned

out years ago, overloaded and went haywire, probably back when I was
at the Hansons’, now the smallest amount of pressure or stress seems to
send painfully intense bolts of electricity through my limbs, make my
breathing ragged, shrivel my gut, my brain all tractionless whirling.

It’s true I fear this child coming into our lives, the terrible interruption it
will be, the child seems to be against my interests, seems to want to make
me do things I hate and pile worry on me. Is there a course I can attend,
some ante-natal course for anxious fathers? But everything changes when
the baby is here, I just need to hold on. That’s the wager isn’t it, that the
change makes all the fear of change that preceded it seem ludicrous. A
whole other set of considerations will come into being, the world will
shift around and decentre and I’ll be readjusted by it. I have lived and
died so many times already, what is one more death, one more rebirth?

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of
death but once.”

And yet the money, the money, the money…

Today in work they gave me a verbal warning.

It came out of nowhere as far as I was concerned. I was between classes

when suddenly David, my boss, was hauling me into his office to tell me
that an undisclosed number of students had complained about me.
They’ve spotted me it seems, writing in lessons. Naturally I protested my
innocence but it is true that on two consecutive days last week I set them
tests or long reading and grammar exercises, and then sat at my desk
scribbling away, working on this, trying to get it all done in time. I
thought I had a good enough relationship with them to get away with it,
but it seems not. I wonder who it was. Probably one of the Germans.
Surely that didn’t merit a warning? No, but then there was my lateness to
consider too and I had been spoken to twice about it in the past week.

My first impulse was to say ok, fuck your stupid job, I was late because I
was up into the small hours writing, because I slept on the floor with a
pile of unwashed clothes for a pillow, but of course I didn’t. I went on my
break and my anger quickly modulated down to guilt and anxiety over
the course of the half hour. Should I tell Andrea? Perhaps best not to. She
would only worry that I was going to loose my job and now would be the
worst possible time for that. Going back into class I found it hard to
conceal my irritation, my dampened spirits, and the atmosphere was a
little tense for a while, but then I reasoned to myself that it didn’t matter,
that I’d soon be leaving this job anyway. A pleasant wave of emotion
swept through me when I anticipated the day I would hand in my notice
and then all the later shock and consternation among my colleagues
when the book came out. The media circus, the controversy. I folded up
the pieces of scrap paper I had been scribbling on during the first lesson
and stuck them in my back pocket with a slightly sceptical look on my
face and a little, half-amused sigh, just to show whoever had complained
how trivial I regarded their complaints and my subsequent warning.

I think Andrea has been in here, snooping around.

The file that I’m working on, which is sitting on my desktop under the
title “1996” was open today when I turned the screen on and I’m
confident that I closed it last night when I finished. Looking round the
room I felt that perhaps a few things were in different places, a broad
vague impression of elements of the room being subtly misaligned rather
than any glaring difference.

Should I ask her? I almost certainly won’t and besides I’m sure she’d deny
it. I nervously skimmed back through what I’d written to see if there was
anything incriminating. Luckily I have still yet to get to any of the real
details of what happened at the Hansons’. I have been trying to get down
the specifics of the more gruesome episodes in my notebook and leaving
more general stuff for the file on the PC. Perhaps I also did it because that
way I can keep it on me at all times and make sure that if Andrea does
come snooping she won’t find anything.

I have realized that I’ll have to go into a lot of detail probably, as I myself
witnessed nothing more than one murder and two instances of rape. That
sounds callous, or flippant but really given the number of girls that
Robert and Mary Hanson murdered, though Mary’s complicity was of
course never proven, what I myself saw was but the tip of the iceberg.

I wish I could remember the key things. The rapes, the murder, how I got
out of there.

Two instances of rape. Perhaps this is why I feel so ambivalent about

having a child, or why I connect children to pain and suffering. Yet I
have a good relationship with my niece and nephew, with my own
parents, generally kids like me, generally I like being around them. And
yet, in some ways what troubles me about the Hansons’ is what a perfect
family they were, what a perfect distillation of its basic drives. I don’t
know exactly what I mean by that. I suppose I wonder whether the
Hanson’s weren’t family in its raw, elemental form. I think that Mary and
Robert Hanson were in love in a way that few people will understand,
really in love, possessed by each other, absolutely intimate,
unconstrained in their desire, totally mutually supportive on one level
even as they tore each other apart on another.

I feel them at my back, I feel the parallel universe through which they
moved and how it nudges into ours. I remember once in Greenwich
market I saw a nice, decent middle class dad with his kid. The boy was
running toward the other end of the market as the father pathetically
tried to reason with him, the small person, the little adult. Come back,
remember we don’t run, we don’t go near the road, now stop, jogging
along behind him as he went full pelt and obliviously on toward the
market exit. At the last possible moment he had to grab the kid to stop
him getting out onto the road. He stooped and caught the child’s arm,
lifted it, spun it round as I was coming up behind him. I saw his face, a
mask of anger and barely concealed satisfaction at the way the child
squealed and began to cry. He would like to have done more. He would
like to have beaten it, to scream into its purpling, tear streaked face the
way the lower orders do. Almost immediately his face was a rictus of
bland, middle class civility once again, but I saw what was in his heart at
the instant. No doubt there is great and overwhelming love too. No doubt
there are many things and not all of them can be looked at or even
spoken about.

I once heard a mother say to her child, Oh I could just eat you and the
awfulness of the expression struck me. There it was, a banal, even
saccharine expression of something horrible and murderous underneath,
something cannibalistic. There is level of pure horror to existence which
perhaps I will never be able to escape from.

And yet when it comes to me it comes in flashes and most of the time I
can look away from it. Is it this way for everyone? Still, at my age I would
like to convene the entirety of humanity and ask them a few basic
questions.

But still, as I said I can look away from this most of the time and I should,
I must, for Andrea’s sake, for the child’s, my own. And it’s these thoughts
I should write down in the book, keep them hidden away, carry around
in my jacket pocket. Thoughts of this kind, some of the excesses at the
Hansons’, the things that went on with Jessica, all this will go in there
and I will keep it on me at all times so that if she does come looking to
see what I’m doing, to find out who I am or if I really love her or I even if
I simply am doing any work in here then anything which might disturb
her will be elsewhere. I need to protect her from the truth for a while,
then I can make a clean breast of things once the book has been
accepted.(12)

Once that has happened then everything will make retrospective sense to
her and she’ll laugh at the suspicions and fears she has now, rather as I
will once the babies here.

I like that symmetry. Perfect.

My dad’s been on the phone telling me that things are going badly in the
States. Some kind of fuck-up with the banks having leant out to people
who can’t pay it back. He likes to ring me every now and then to keep me
updated on significant world events knowing that we don’t have a TV.
He’s partly rung me up to gloat as well, I know. I do my best to humour
him, he doesn’t have many opportunities to talk about politics any more,
to show off a bit. My dad is taking a certain pleasure in the economic bad
news he thinks he can spot on the horizon. He thinks I’ll benefit: house
prices will be coming down, but suddenly I’m weary of thinking about
houses. Something tells me they’re too expensive at any price

Unsustainable is the word he keeps using,

The news has depressed me, the forecast of more trouble to come. He’s
seen it happen before, they say this is the end of boom and bust there are
no contradictions anymore, problem solved. Perhaps my dad’s right, we’ll
see a slump and house prices will fall, bring something reasonable for me,
Andrea and the kids within our grasp. Even so the news depressed me
somehow, the ease and speed with which a settled and fixed world can
begin to fall apart, the speed with which all the cast iron laws and
unwritten assumptions that held the world in place can just dissolve,
shocks me.
Why it shocks me I can’t imagine, I have seen the truth of it myself. I
remember how suddenly at the Hansons’ everything fell away from me,
the props and buttresses of the world gave way and in an instant I was
free. It requires a massive effort to hold a life in place, a titanic act of will,
a real talent for repression. Perhaps love is the thing, the charm, that
transforms all that grey scaffolding into spun gold. Perhaps I’m incapable
of love.

I was morose when Andrea came home, fractious from having spent so
long listening to my dad thumb through his threadbare stock of
arguments and anecdotes. I failed to get round to any writing and spent
the evening in a melancholy slump in the living room. It was 9:30 before
I even thought about what we were going to eat and then I had to dash
out to the local co-op and try and find something inspiring among its
limited and over-familiar range. In the end I went for ravioli and pesto,
primarily because it was quick, then I got distracted by nothing again in
the kitchen and overcooked the pasta. As I was stirring in the pesto it
began to disintegrate and so when she got back we had what amounted to
little more than large plate of mush with some tomatoes cut up in it.

We tried to chat during the meal. Andrea said nothing about the quality
of the food but every mouthful I had just angered me more and more,
until I was almost retching on the stuff.

“I’m sorry this is so disgusting,” I said. She smiled a “nevermind” at me.

“Did you get me the raspberries?” she asked hopefully. She’s had a
strange, strong craving for them for the past few weeks.
“Fuck,” I said and winced.

“Oh, I was looking forward to them!”

“I’ll go and get them,” I said. “The Co-op doesn’t close till eleven. I’ll go
now.”

“ No, you don’t need to, it’s ok.”

“ No. It’s fine, I’ll go. You’re obviously disappointed.”

“No. Come on. I’m fine.”

“No. This pasta was horrible.” I dropped my fork down into the half-
finished mass. “Let me get you some raspberries to make up for it.”

“I don’t want you to go all the way back to the shop.”

“It’s five minutes. It’s Ok.” I was standing already.

She looked at me beseechingly. “I need to go out again anyway. I need to

get something for lunch tomorrow,” I said.
The only thing on my mind as I stomped along to the Co-op was how I
was going to be able to drink something now without her smelling it on
me when I got back.

We should not have brought children into this, we should not have
brought children into this I was saying to myself over and over again,
though whether I meant this world or this relationship it is hard to say.

There were no raspberries in the co-op so I resolved to go to the

Sainsbury at the end of Woolwich road, a twenty minute walk away. Half
way there I sent a text explaining as much and suggesting that Andrea go
to bed but that she would have some for the morning. She rang me back
and I explained that I was already half way there and that it would be
pointless to turn back now. Her voice was a little shaky but rather than
any compassion I felt irritation, another attempt to step between me and
my clear purpose, which was to drink something. As I was getting to the
end of the road I calculated that I may not be able to buy anything
alcoholic from the supermarket if it was after eleven and swerved into a
pub just below the Blackwall tunnel overpass.

I got a double whiskey and knocked it back then started counting out the
change in my pocket to see if I could afford another. I could.

Then I headed for Sainsbury’s my mind boiling, the whiskey eating away
at my lungs. I was almost muttering out loud as I came into the store.
Everything hangs by a thread, everything hangs by a thread.
I knew we would have conflict tonight, normally I get three e-mails a

day, several texts, at least one call, instructions on what we need, queries

about things connected to pregnancy, questions about where I am and

what I’m doing, but today nothing.

I tried to buy something nice for dinner and an extra carton of raspberries

to sweeten her mood once she got back. Actually I was shocked by how

unhappy she looked, her eyes still puffy from the night before, or from

having been crying during the day.

“We need to talk,” she told me. I agreed. We went into the living room

She lowered herself onto the sofa and I sat cross legged in front of her on

the floor.

“Have you been looking at what I’m writing on the computer?” I asked

her.
“No,” she told me. She was lying. She peered at me as though there was

something extra or absent about me that she couldn’t quite get into

perspective.

I understand her, picking over my writing, scrutinizing me from the

outside trying to catch something of the self I seem to spend all my

energy diverting her gaze away from. Who I am is all the ways I hide

myself.

She obviously had things to say but I had taken the initiative and seemed

to have found myself in attack mode despite having sworn to myself all

day that I would be conciliatory.

“What is this obsession with knowing what’s going on in my head? I

don’t have to know everything that’s going on in yours. Every last scrap
of fantasy, every passing thought. I’m English,” I said, “for better or worse

we believe that every man has his own private citadel inside and that he

alone has the key. That he has the right to that. That no-one should want

to intrude there. So why do you want to intrude there?” I was

exasperated.

“Because I love you,” she said. It sounded like a reproach. It sounded like

a claim to moral superiority.

“Well, well done you,” I said. “See where love gets you?”

“Why are you such a bastard?” she asked me.

“Why do you love someone who’s such a bastard?” I asked. “That sounds

like questionable judgment to me.”

“I wish I didn’t,” she said

Don’t do this, I told myself. I could feel it rising in me.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. The act of suppressing my anger made me

smile.

“It’s not funny. Why is it funny?”

“No, it’s not, it’s not. All right. It’s the absurdity of it that’s making me

laugh.”

“I’m carrying your child,” she said

What the fuck does that have to do with anything? “I know,” I said,

soothingly.

“I want my child to have a father who has some respect for people.”

A child who doesn’t call people bastards? You get what you give.

“I do respect you,” I said. “Let’s just calm down.”

“Why do I always have to do what you say? Why are you always giving

me orders?”

“Giving you orders? All right,” I said, my temper surging again, “don’t

calm down, then. Become hysterical, scream and cry. That will be great

for the baby I’m sure.”

There was a pause. “Come on then, let’s whip ourselves up into a frenzy,”

my voice was getting louder. I was speaking from somewhere deeper

inside myself.

“I’m not having this conversation. I can’t talk to you when you’re like

this,” she said and went upstairs to sulk and complain to her mother

about me on the telephone.

For twenty minutes or so I was livid and I told myself to hang on to the

anger, she’s unbearable, unreasonable to an insane degree, remember

that, but slowly my anger abated and then just as predictably I felt

remorseful again and anxious that I’d upset her, wondered how I could

make amends.

Of course, I should put the shelves up. They were stacked in the alcove.
After about half an hour of the drill going I called up the stairs to see if

she wanted a cup of tea then crept up there to double check, her silence

was an invitation. She was sitting looking grumpy on the bed.

“I’m putting the shelves up,” I told her

“I can’t believe it,” she said

“Believe the unbelievable,” I told her, brandishing a hammer.

“Are you putting them up straight?”

I smiled. Suddenly we loved each other again. Why can’t it always be

like this, why can’t these moments endure?

“Sleep with me tonight,” she said. “Don’t sleep in the spare room.”

The conquering hero with his remorse and his DIY.

I slept with her, my hand on her belly, the fragrance of her hair, feeling
suddenly that we needed nothing more from existence than each other.
You can mitigate against it all, you can stand in for everything that’s
lacking. But in the middle of the night I woke up and there was
something cold pressing against my heart. A dark, empty pocket at the
centre of it all, that in moments, and for shorter and shorter spells is
covered over, but which always returns.(15)
Out of nowhere, today in class, I snapped.

There is a student who has been annoying me for a number of days. A

Mexican, typical rich south American, went to a good school, 19 years
old, never had to work for anything in his life, out to subvert and
undermine every activity, to prove his originality, to demonstrate how
cool he is, out to remind everyone that only losers play by the rules
All the time I was trying to explain something to a Russian student at the
back of the room he was making faces and gestures to Sybrand the
equally disinterested Dutch guy opposite. I‘ve been filtering him out
when he messes around for a number of days now, at other points trying
to win him over, to make him the star, give him the attention he wants,
overlook his eating in class, his refusal to focus on the topics in the
speaking activities and instead let him set his own agenda but today
suddenly I couldn’t control myself any longer.

It came from somewhere out beyond me. I hadn’t even really been aware
of being that annoyed. Lately going into class has been a battle and I’ve
been doing everything I can to make it better, being as agreeable, as
interested as possible after my anonymous complaint. This will only have
made everything worse.
“Why don’t you fucking listen,” I said.
I could feel the anger rising. It’s rare I loose my temper, really loose it,
but when I do something happens to my face and voice that has an
immediate impact on whoever I’m angry with.

He looked at me, shocked. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have used

the word fuck.
“Why don’t you stop showing off and distracting everybody. You’re being
extremely impolite.”

The words themselves were innocuous enough but my delivery of them

was murderously slow and precise.
“I’m not doing anything,” he said
“Don’t presume to treat me like I’m an idiot. You think you’re too good
for this and you want to demonstrate that to everyone. You don’t
convince me. You don’t charm me. I’m a little bit older and there’s
nothing original or interesting about you. You’re simply vain. I’ve seen
privileged, useless people like you a thousand times.”
He was angry and held my gaze as I held his but his face was flushed and
mine was set cold. Weakling, I wanted to say to him. The moment your
little bubble of fantasy is punctured you want to cry. Pathetic rich little
fool.

“Pay attention or leave.” I told him, with predictable consequences.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” he said, standing up and gathering his
things. All the other students were staring fixedly at their books. “I pay
your salary, man.”
Then he was out, the door slamming behind him. For a minute or so the
pressure and heat in the room shifted, my vision was white with
adrenaline. I directed the remaining students to page 39 then went out to
the toilet and stood in the cubicle taking deep breaths, my hands shaking
slightly then I put my head round the door of James’ classroom and asked
if he could cover me that afternoon. He nodded.
“Of course mate, are you alright?”
Immediately after the lesson finished, the remaining hour of which was
a torture of nervous embarrassment for all concerned as we tried to get
back to a normal state of affairs with no-one being able to meet my eye, I
went down to the office and explained that I had a pressing personal
matter and had to go home immediately. James would cover me. Before
they had any time to raise an objection I was out of the door and
pounding home along Creek road. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck
this. Fuck work.
I should go home and write, this is what I need to do. I’ll go home and
write five thousand words. Better still, fuck that, I’ll write a pitch and a
precis of the story and send it off tomorrow morning. I can get that done
in a day. Do it that way and then at least you’ll have something concrete
done, you’ll have set the wheels in motion

I swerved into Wetherspoons on the way past, still on automatic pilot my

thoughts everywhere but in the here and now and ordered a double
whisky. Just to calm my nerves.
It was good to be in out of the midday glare and heat. A double with ice. I
knocked it back and immediately ordered another that I drank more or
less as quickly, then a third. When I came out again the whole day was
cocooned in a soft, white gauze. I came up through Greenwich market
shouting to myself, this is typical of you, typical. Go home and work, get
something done. Stop dreaming. I remembered how I had felt on the bus
ride back from the post office through Castleford, how I’d been
swimming in fantasy, certain of the kind of success that was coming to
me. How easy it all was if I just put my mind to it and how easy it was
really to put my mind to anything.

Now I was drunk and regretted it, I needed a coffee to counteract the
whisky. I went into a bakers at the entrance and bought a large latte with
three shots of espresso and drank it crossing the road with my head down
to protect my eyes from the heat and force of the sun. When I got back I
was sick from the combination of whisky and caffeine, the anger and the
heat, my mind racing and settling nowhere. I leant over the toilet bowl
for a while but brought nothing up and then lay down on the floor. The
floorboards were cool against my face.
Andrea, Andrea, Andrea. I was saying, but it was only Andrea in the
most abstract sense that I wanted. Andrea herself would have had
nothing but anger and scorn and fear to give me, had she come through
the door at that moment.

How long I lay there I don’t know. Eventually I got up and went into the
study, drew the curtains and turned on the computer. As I waited for it to
start up I picked up my notebook and scribbled a few thoughts in it that
slowly began to expand into a paragraph or two and that soon absorbed
me completely
I seem capable of writing everything except what I should be
writing.(14)
Before Andrea came home I got into bed and claimed I was unwell, that
I’d had to come home from work early and needed to sleep, she regarded
me, expressionless, from the doorway then went back downstairs. I lay
there in the dark wondering if she could smell the alcohol on me, hungry
and wretched with the aroma of food coming up from the kitchen,
hearing her talking on the telephone in Spanish in a voice low and fast
enough for me not to be able to understand what she was saying.
I took the day off work today. I rang my line manager and told her that I

had a stomach bug and that while, yes, I realised Summer was the busiest

time of the year and that we were extremely short staffed I simply

couldn’t make it in.

Andrea had to go out to a teachers’ meeting at ten and so I had most of

the day free to write. I didn’t manage much, I was still too preoccupied

with my behavior in class yesterday, the icy tone in my line manager’s

voice, the inevitable consequences tomorrow when I go in. If I go in.

Well, I have to go in.

Andrea came home and began moving around in the kitchen without
calling out to me and I seemed to be frozen mutely in my chair. I heard
her go into the living room to eat and then climb the stairs to bed. A
deep, jagged sorrow came coursing through me hearing her moving
silently through her life as I sat sunk in my own.
I could go up there. Even a week ago I would have done.
Something has died. We have already begun mourning it. Perhaps we
began months ago. Life goes about its secret business, what can you do
but watch and suffer?
Nonetheless we must go on, for the child’s sake. It will be a new rallying
point for us, a shared focus.

I came home today after work wondering whether I should tell Andrea
that I’d been given a written warning, then sensed that it didn’t matter as
soon as I got in the door.
I knew she was in and I called hello up the stairs but there was no
response. I came up to the first floor tentatively and called her name.
There was a deeper flatness, a more solid absence to the silence than I
had felt before and all my nerves were quivering.

“Hello.”

She didn’t respond but I could hear her sniffing in the living room,
crying. My heart sank a little further. What now?

And then I told myself that it couldn’t have anything to do with me. I
had made the effort to come up the stairs that morning with a cup of tea
and to chat with her for a while, ask her what she was going to do with
her day, and this little break into simple communication between us had
had a great effect on both our moods. Later she texted me to say she was
sorting out the living room at last. It must be something connected with
home or work. Maybe just a hormonal thing. I prepared myself to be
conciliatory.

I put my head around the door with a cheery smile on my face, trying to
be positive. Andrea was sitting on the sofa, an open book in her hands the
shelves up in the alcove half filled.

“Hello,” I said again.

She didn’t look up at me for a moment and when she did her eyes were
wild with pain and fear. I stepped in through the doorway.
“ Jesus, Jesus,” I said. “What?”

Then she held the book up to me.

There I was. On the facing page, towel wrapped around me, shivering on
the end of the bed. Underneath the picture it said:

“The final lodger at number fifty. He was never traced and may have
been the last of Robert Hanson’s victims.”

“What is this?” she asked. “Why have you never told me about this?”

I crouched down, staring at the book, the blood roaring in my ears.

“Who are you?” she asked me.

I looked up at her. “It’s me,” I said. “You know me,” I reached out to

touch her and she jerked violently back, waving her hand around,

warding me off. Then she stood with her head down. “I don’t know you,

I don’t know you, I don’t know you,” she said as she walked quickly out

of the room and up the stairs.

I went round in panicked circles in the living room for a few minutes, my

heart racing. Then I went to the foot of the stairs, feeling useless.

Unbelievable. I went back and looked at the book several times. I almost

laughed.

“What are you doing up there?” I shouted and got no reply. I went up.

She was packing.

“Where are you going to go? This is crazy. Where are you going to go?” I

asked.

“Away. Away. I don’t know who you are.”

“Look, look,” I said, trying to dismiss it all “This is what I’m writing

about. This is the story I’m telling, I can sell it. Sit down. Let me explain

it to you.”

“I don’t care about money,” she said.” I don’t care about that. I want

someone I can know.”

I lost my temper. “Fuck that.” I said. “Who knows themselves? Who

knows themselves?” I asked.

“I know myself,” she said in a quiet, determined voice.

Fifteen minutes later she was gone.(16)

It’s been a week now.
Now it’s been two.

Two weeks in which I’ve been sitting here trying to understand what has

happened to me. I haven’t been to work. I told them I’d had a personal

tragedy and that I wouldn’t be in for the foreseeable future. Then I

turned off my mobile and unplugged the phone. I expected some contact

from Andrea in the first week and I checked my e-mails every few

minutes, then went back to lying on the floor again. I’ve hardly eaten and

when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror I can see how much weight

I’ve lost.(17)
Now it’s been three.

The nights are getting noticeably shorter. Still no contact. I assume I’ve

lost my job by now.

The twentieth of September has been and gone.

I’ve spent a long time reading through my old notebook, taking the time

to try and understand what I meant, to decipher the scrawled words, to

reconnect with what I hoped for then and again and again the question

has come to me whether this past ten tears has not just been one great

evasion. I dream at nights that I am still twenty six and wake up with a

sense of overwhelming relief, telling myself it’s not too late, it’s not too

late.
Who are you? I ask myself in the bathroom mirror and the answer comes

back, “you were born in Barrow- in-Furness in 1970, the son of Elizabeth,

a cleaner at the local bus depot and Brian a plumber in the shipyard...”

(18)

Today I turned the phone back on. The first person to phone was my

mother.

“Carl, where have you been?” she asked me.

It was late. I was looking out of the window at the street, one of the foxes

out there, staring back up at me, its nose quivering.

I explained the situation to her.

“And where are you now?” she asked.

I watched the fox curl in on itself and disappear through a gap in the

fencing, a secret hope rising in me, the whole world outside my window

vibrating slightly.

A man must pass through himself.

“Home.” (19)
Notes.

(1)At this point the only person I have to confide in, the only person I
have to confess to, is you.

(2) Preliminary research into Robert Hanson, Googling Wikipedia pages

in work and so on has served to undercut much of what I remember
about him. In my imagination for instance he’s a big man. I think of him
as being taller than me, though of course that’s absurd as I’m six-foot
four. The reality is that he was five foot six. In photographs of him
flanked by policemen entering or leaving court he looks almost childlike.

(3) I know what you’ll be expecting a little further on in my writing and

don’t worry I can promise you plenty of gruesome detail. But I also need
to add a little background. I feel you hanging over me as I sit here, urging
me on, censoring, directing me, twisting my words toward you. Who are
you exactly? You could be anyone at all, yet you feel very definite to me,
someone I know, have always known.

(4) Reading transcripts of Robert Hanson’s interviews after his arrest the
degree to which he was deluded has been startling. As they go on he
becomes increasingly confused and incoherent until, talking about his
trips back to the house or out to Turnpike field to help the police identify
where to dig he seems to have been hallucinating the spirits of the dead
girls in the form of electrostaticaly-charged multicolored mists rising up
from the ground and entering him.

The general attitude in most of the interviews with the police officers
who were assigned to him at the time, along with the other functionaries
who came into contact with him was that he was little more than a
simpleton, a garrulous buffoon, scarcely credible as a murderer.

This has made uncomfortable reading for me. It’s certainly not how I
remember Robert Hanson. For me he has been a terrifying figure, a
nightmare, a trauma. Even now there are many incidents during my time
at the Hanson’s house that I simply can not recall. Key moments that the
success of this venture depend on, and which I must get at.

(5) She can be domineering and fussy, I know. I know I have clung onto
her like a drowning man, I have tied myself to her to stop myself from
coming apart. I remind myself that without her I would have no life at
all, without her I would be a remorseless drunk, toothless, ill, sunk in
morbidity, rotting away somewhere and now I have something,
something at least that passes for a life and even if she can be
unreasonable, demanding, inflexible, hysterical sometimes, her
unreasonable demands have allowed me to live.

You understand that much, don’t you? You can forgive me that, can’t
you?

(6) Perhaps I was trying to fool you. Some hope of that.

(7) In moments I see myself for what I am, a weak man who has been
passed from one master to another. All I wanted was to commit myself to
something, to cleave to something. Careerists have their work,
Nationalist have the nation, Capitalists still have the market, but what do
I have? I have been disinvested.

(8) Still, it was more than this. I shouldn’t make excuses, there was
something weak in me that I spent all my strength on trying to deny.
This is not a heroic tale. You want more heroism, don’t you? Some titanic
effort of the will, some way I made myself live and fought against
impossible odds to triumph. I know, I’ve been looking at all the books
you’ve been reading in Waterstones, checking up on the competition.
You want something inspirational, but I was rescued as I was abandoned,
life carried me along in its wake and the difference between the drowned
and the saved is down to the driftwood that floats by, the way the
currents shift and swirl. I am not the sympathetic hero of my own life
story. I’m not even its central character.

You are.
(9) There’s a documentary about the Hanson’s available online, a three-
parter that was shown on channel five a couple of years ago, which must
be rich in information but which I haven’t been able to bring myself to
watch. I have a strange terror of seeing those faces, hearing those voices
again, listening to the long, famously insane and contradictory interviews
with police. Probably what I fear is how reduced, how diminished in
scale they will all seem, and how much more wretched I will appear to
myself for ever having been overwhelmed by them. And yet it’s
understandable, they possessed that supreme capacity that renders all
others superfluous, the capacity for violence.

(10) I can tell you everything, I know. Indeed, I have to, so let me
confess this to you, today, as we were eating lunch in the cafeteria I had a
moment’s terrible, dark suspicion about Andrea.

My line manager was talking about her impending marriage, the idea of
having kids. She speculated that if her sister hadn’t had kids with her
partner then he probably would have left her years ago. Kids give you
more security don’t they, she said to Laura, who agreed. The sandwich I
was eating turned to wood in my mouth.

Is that how it is? Have a child and then he’ll feel too compromised to
leave you, yolk him to you. I was distracted again in class thinking, is this
it then, is this just one more part of the great deception too, really? The
women’s basic desire is for the child and the man is just an appendage, a
financial prop. Perhaps it is. Did I think otherwise?
Was that all I was to her, all I am, so much pliable raw material? Was
what she saw in me the ghost of the children I could give her?

Do you have any answer for me?

(11) Why am I anatomising myself here on the page for you? For
someone who will never offer me anything? This is a relationship in it’s
purest form, you give me your money and I open up every last aspect of
myself to you, labour away at the fullest stretch of my abilities, of my
nerves,to gratify your few precious pounds. And yet you’ll say I chose
this won’t you? That I needn’t have done it, I could have done otherwise.
Can’t we offer each other understanding, comradeship, can’t we live in
and through and for each other, move each others’ hearts and limbs,
blend our wills? No? Then we will have let it be money that decides for
us. You sitting back in your chair, me slumped over my desk in the small
hours. You’re running me ragged, you’re using me up, and yet you don’t
even exist.

(12) Perhaps you can explain something to me, so that I might have a
better idea as to how to give you what you want.
 It seems to work like this, we love our children, the family is the
ultimate happiness; yet nothing seems to give us greater pleasure than
reading about the suffering of other peoples’ children, nothing gratifies us
more than watching relationships dissolve. I see it in the newspapers
outside the garage where I stop to buy a coffee on my way to work
everyday, every time I see the TV. Bad mothers, bad fathers, bad
husbands and wives held up to be excoriated. Beaten children, raped
children, missing children, murdered children.

(13) They brought someone else back with them. The old me, the person
I used to be. A person they partially forced me to become again, and who
somehow I haven’t been able to get rid of yet, an early self that I
abandoned somewhere along the road and which they picked up and
forced me to occupy. I could see sense him sitting beside me, eyes
bloodshot, his face sallow and full of mockery. At first I was angry, not
with them, exactly, but with the whole situation, the set of assumptions
about who I was, the role I was forced to play but slowly I began to relax
into it. Over the past few days I have been a little more hospitable to my
former self. Eyes closed at night I almost feel a process of chemical
bonding going on, a reintegration, some third party coming in to being
that is neither the way I was or the way I am. Re-reading the journal has
done this to me, writing again for the first time in ten years has done it to
me, getting my thoughts down, even if I’m not writing what I thought I
would I’m still producing something, and even if I’m the only person
who ever reads it, so what?

(14) I apologize for my outburst a few days ago. In my defense I was

drunk and it’s often difficult for me to control my emotions when I am. I
know Andrea must have suffered a lot early on when we were together
and I was drinking heavily. I have a lot of anger and fear, something
which I’m better at controlling but which still surfaces when I‘m tired or
have had a drink. This is why I mustn’t get back into it again. Sometimes
I can be resentful about Andrea about the discipline she imposed on me,
but I needed it.

What’s making the situation worse is that I can’t seem to dredge up much
of what happened to me at the Hansons. Mining my life, all its closed-off
tunnels, dead ends, detours, trying to find that rich seam, strike gold. I
know that I witnessed certain things at the Hansons, that I filmed the
rape and torture of his daughter, that I was present in the house when
Agnes was murdered, but these are largely just markers, content-less
signs, outlines of an experience that my mind refuses to fill in.

I have tried a number of tactics, letting my mind drift, turning my

attention away from my own thoughts, hoping something will surface
that I can then quickly latch onto. Or the opposite, grafting intensively
away, chiseling at the dark, you at my back, with your endless, silent
demand.

Other things seem to be emerging, though, filtering through the cracks

and fissures. Last night I dreamt that I had been tied down to a chair, my
head was held back and an electric drill pushed into my mouth. My teeth
came whirring and splintering out instantly, lost forever and I woke up
sweating, Andrea shifting around in the bed beside me. For a moment I
felt as though someone were silently withdrawing, dissolving back into
the dark at the foot of the bed, slipping under the door, seeping back into
the brickwork. Was that you, then, experimenting with me in my sleep,
your fingers in me, trying to scratch something up?

(15) I fear you as I suppose I have always feared everything. I look back
over my life and see the extent to which it has been constructed by fear. I
fear you, but without my fear what would I be. I am my fear.

I am you.

(16) I knew it, I always knew she would have her revenge on me for that
rejection. She would wait patiently then strike. I salute you Mary
Hanson, your expertise, your command of the future, the skill with
which you laid your trap. I’m drinking to you tonight, to you, squatting
cold and toad-like in the dark of your cell, cackling softly to yourself, the
blood dripping from your nails, the souls of all the dead you’ve swallowed
whooping in your belly.
Wait, though, Mary Hanson, we must be clear what has happened here.
Might it not be that finally that the joke’s on you?

(17) I can feel myself describing a downward arc, breaking up on re-

entry, soon, softly, in a cloud of dust and long billowing tentacles, the
hull all singed and shattered, I’ll go plummeting into another world all
together, a darker world perhaps, a world with a different, stranger and
starker geometry, all clean lines and angles, a world, a world……

How many worlds there are in me? I am myself the compass of that sea?

Creator of all things. Nothing in myself, composite of all that’s been

before me, receptacle, hollow man, nothing myself, nothing, borne on
the waves of history.

Is a man a God or a puppet?

Excuse me, excuse me. I’m being ridiculous.

Forgive me.

I’m drunk.
(18) I have some bad news, I’m afraid.

I’ve had enough of you. I’m turning my back on you. I’m starting again
and this time you’re not coming with me. You don’t even exist. I’d
apologize to you for being drunk, but who would I be apologizing to?
And besides, I’m not drunk. Oh no. I’m clear-eyed and I’m looking right
through you, watching you dissolve.

(19)