CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Burnside
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
I Put a Spell on You
First Digression: On Glamourie
The Dark End of the Street
Second Digression: On Thrawn
You Can’t Do That
Everlasting Love
Third Digression: On Narcissism
Strange Days
Fourth Digression: On Lost Girl Syndrome
Feast of the Mau Mau / Portrait of Hezekiah Trambles
Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Fifth Digression: On Murder Ballads
Welcome to the Machine
Piano
Miss You
Interlude: Smiles of a Summer Night
Running Away
Sixth Digression: Why Being Lost Is an Instance of Good Fortune
Humor Me
Seventh Digression: On the Mountains of the Moon
Interlude: Portrait of Mel Lyman
Good Fortune
Postlude: A New Kind of Love
Coda: (It’s the) Same Old Song
Acknowledgements
Copyright
In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge. This is a memoir of romance – of lost love and the love of being lost – darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour.
The old Scots word ‘glamour’ means magical charm, and the first time he was played I Put a Spell on You, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song – it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him – love, possession and danger – and this book is an exploration of the darker side of glamour and attraction. Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, the book follows the author through a series of uncanny encounters with ‘lost girls’, with brilliant digressions on murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia, and a cast that includes Kafka and Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, The Four Tops and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and time spent lost in the Arctic Circle, black-and-white films and a mental institution. Ending with the tender summoning of the ghost of his dying mother as she sings along to the radio in her empty kitchen, I Put a Spell on You is a book about memory, about the other side of love: a book of secrets and wonders.
John Burnside’s recent books include the poetry collection All One Breath, the book of stories, Something Like Happy, – the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year – the novel, A Summer of Drowning, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Prize, and his poetry collection, Black Cat Bone, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at St Andrews.
ALSO BY JOHN BURNSIDE
FICTION
The Dumb House
The Mercy Boys
Burning Elvis
The Locust Room
Living Nowhere
The Devil’s Footprints
Glister
A Summer of Drowning
Something Like Happy
POETRY
The Hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Swimming in the Flood
A Normal Skin
The Asylum Dance
The Light Trap
The Good Neighbour
Selected Poems
Gift Songs
The Hunt in the Forest
Black Cat Bone
All One Breath
NON-FICTION
A Lie About My Father
Waking Up in Toytown
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2014
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Copyright © John Burnside 2014
John Burnside has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases, names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.
Lines from Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud are reproduced by permission of the Marsh Agency on behalf of Sigmund Freud Copyrights and W.W. Norton.
Lines from ‘Canto LXXXI’ by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright © 1948 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Jonathan Cape
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224093873
i.m. Theresa Burnside
The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
My love seems to me like a deep, bottomless abyss, into which I subside deeper and deeper. There is nothing now which could save me from it.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading …
Laurence Sterne
In the spring of 1958, my family moved from a rat-haunted tenement on King Street to one of the last remaining prefabs in Cowdenbeath, on the very border between the rubble-strewn woods behind Stenhouse Street and the scrubby farmland beyond. It was a move up, in most ways; the prefabs had been built as temporary wartime accommodation but, to my child’s mind at least, the cold and the damp, the putty-tainted pools of condensation on winter mornings and the airless heat of August afternoons were minor concerns, compared to the pleasure of living on our own garden plot, in what was, essentially, a detached house, just yards from a stand of high beech trees where tawny owls hunted through the night, their to-and-fro cries so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister. Just beyond that stand of trees was Kirk’s chicken farm, where the birds ran free in wide pens and Mr Kirk, who lived in an old stone house that I took for a mansion, walked back and forth all day, distributing feed, collecting eggs and mucking out the henhouses. Later, when I was old enough, he would let me walk with him, and I took great pride in keeping pace with a grown man as he went about his business, peering into the incubators and manhandling heavy buckets of grain from here to there, while he watched with contained amusement. On the other side of the house, towards what I liked to think of as open country, the fields ran away to the strip woods in one direction, and the grey, leechy waters of Loch Fitty in the other, and I wandered out there whenever I could, imagining myself a child of the countryside, like the boys in picture books, or one of the chums from the Rupert annuals my Auntie Sall gave me every year for Christmas.
I was only three years old when we moved to Blackburn Drive but it wasn’t long before I grasped the idea that we really were ‘coming up’ in the world. By the time I was seven, we actually had a television set and on Sundays, even though it was school the next day, Margaret and I would occasionally be allowed to sit up, eating ice cream from Katy’s van and watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium. I don’t know why I ever thought of this as a treat; the show wasn’t very interesting to a seven-year-old and, though they sometimes had pop stars on the bill, it was mostly dancers and novelty acts. Soon, my loyalties switched to Juke Box Jury, where you could hear the latest releases and the panellists were slender and nice-looking, with beehive hairdos and mod dresses, like my cousin Madeleine. They weren’t as beautiful, though, and when Madeleine came round to our house, as she sometimes did on a Saturday afternoon, I would sit for hours at the kitchen table while she and my mother chatted, fascinated by her long, slim fingers and the cherry-red or powder-blue varnish on her nails. Every time she came, she looked different – new nails, new hair, a new dress – but she was always Madeleine. The very first time we met, at another cousin’s wedding, I had fallen in love with her – and I’ve been in love with her ever since, in various guises. She was ten years older than me and engaged to a merchant seaman called Jackie, but she was the one who led me to understand that the lyrics of all the love songs I’d heard on Juke Box Jury, or on my mother’s radio, actually meant something. I’d thought they were just words, snippets of gibberish and hyperbole that nobody could possibly take seriously; now I knew different because, now, I was in love, and love felt very odd, like hearing the first few lines of a story I would never read to the end, because the end belonged to somebody else.
I don’t want to pretend that this infatuation was ever a real problem, however. Even my nine-year-old self knew I was suffering from a crush and, besides, there was so much to love back then, in an easy, boyish way that I suspect most men wish would last forever. At nine, I loved almost everything, more or less unconditionally. The hushed theatre of the year’s first snow. Teeming thaw water in the ditches and gutters. The arc of a well-thrown ball in the summer sky. That faraway look in Judy Garland’s eyes when the dull storyline pauses and she opens her mouth to sing. Kyries and the black vestments on Good Friday. The blur of the host on my tongue and the taunts of the high-school girls as I walked home along Stenhouse Street and up through the woods by Kirk’s farm. Most of all, I loved the older sisters of my school friends. Still-slender girls turning into more or less beautiful women and undamaged, for now, by wedlock, they were wonderful, free creatures with money in their purses and sweet, lipsticky smiles for the soppy kid who crossed their paths from time to time. All these things made me happy, and it didn’t bother me that such happiness was an affair of the moment. A few minutes, an hour, a September afternoon in the park – the moments came, and then they were gone, so they remained mysterious and uncontaminated: a gift, rather than a burden.
Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon, just after Madeleine and Jackie got married, my mother took me to visit them in their new flat, and Madeleine played us a record she had just bought. It was ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Nina Simone and in the space of two and a half minutes I reached the conclusion that this was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Everybody stopped talking to listen and, when it was over, we all sat round the table, dumbstruck, until Jackie got up and put it on again. Never having heard the song before, I thought Simone’s was the original version and this magical, if slightly sad, afternoon stayed at the back of my mind for years, with the snapshots of my mother and Madeleine in Pittencrieff Park, and the sound of Janice Nicholls on Thank Your Lucky Stars saying, ‘I’ll give it foive,’ strands in the fabric of myself that remained more or less dormant, but were there all the same, like the creatures in a fifties horror film, asleep for now in the Black Lagoon, but ready to be reawakened by the smallest shift in the weather or the tide.
I must have heard that song many times, in several versions, over the next decade or so while my father was noisily planning his escape from Cowdenbeath, first via Australia, then Canada and finally, much to my disappointment, by taking a job at the steelworks in Corby, designated a ‘New Town’ under the 1946 New Towns Act, which had been set up to create ‘planned communities’ run by the Great and the Good on behalf of the common folk.fn1 The move south tore my mother away from her entire family and put an end to my cousin Madeleine’s visits, but nobody said anything about that because, according to my father, it was another move up, to a real house, not a prefab, a better job, better schools, better everything. It had to be better, because it had all been planned by professional people who knew what they were doing. In that, at least, I suppose he was right.
Corby was a disappointment in every way, and for my mother it was something close to a personal tragedy. Our ‘better house’ had three bedrooms, but the kitchen was smaller than the kitchen in our old prefab, and there was no room for a table, what with the clunky fitted units. Nevertheless, she put a brave face on it. She went out and bought a new, portable radio and set it on the windowsill, to keep her company, she said, while she baked and cooked, or when she was out in the garden, planting wallflowers. My father had bought a new television too, an ugly cumbersome thing perched on its own stand in a corner of the flock-patterned living room, but the rest of us continued to ignore it and our new home quickly divided along the old fault lines – horse racing and the football results on the goggle-box in one space, Sing Something Simple and the new BBC radio stations in another. So I would have heard various covers of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ over the years, but I didn’t pay it any mind till a girl called Annie leaned over the back of her seat and sang it to me one Saturday afternoon in the Charolais cafe, her breath smelling of white rum and instant coffee, her painted smile just inches from my face, her delivery less Nina Simone than a cross between Creedence Clearwater and Arthur Brown, though there might have been a touch of camped-up Janis Joplin in there too. Either way, it was quite a performance.
I was startled by this. I didn’t know Annie that well, though I’d often noticed her when she came in, because she was always laughing, always making desperate, slightly hysterical fun of everyone around her, especially herself: a careless, naive, somewhat fearful girl of nineteen, clinging blindly to the sense she had acquired somewhere that, if you didn’t take anything too seriously, there would never be anything to worry about.
So I had noticed her, and we’d said hi a few times, but I’d never paid her any obvious attention and I wasn’t attracted to her, which was always the dividing line, back then, between the girls you bothered with and the ones who blurred into the wallpaper. I did know one of the gang she went around with, a very thin blonde with smudgy blue eyes called Charlotte – and that day, I was aware of her, just off to one side, watching the performance with the rest of the cafe, while Annie carried on singing and I sat frozen, mesmerised by the proximity and the publicness of it all. I’d actually gone out with Charlotte a couple of times, but after a drunken night in Coronation Park it had all come to nothing, and when she started turning up at the Charolais on Saturday afternoons, it came as relief that she had obviously decided to pretend we’d never met. Now, though, she fixed me with a grim, oddly vengeful stare and waited to see what would happen next.
The Charolais was a greasy spoon in Corby’s planned community shopping precinct where people from the pubs round about whiled away the afternoon over a coffee or a bowl of ice cream. It was a short walk from most places, and almost next door to my usual Saturday hangout, a dark, faux-timbered bar room called the Corinthian, where you could buy anything from Benzedrine to a cut-price bridesmaid’s dress – and this made it doubly convenient because, for a long time, I spent every single Saturday at the Corinthian, right up until the bar staff threw me and the last malingerers out at two forty-five. More often than not, I would be nursing that cup of coffee for hours because I’d spent everything I had by last orders. That didn’t matter, though. I didn’t go to the Charolais to eat; I went for the company.
Or rather, I was there to wait, with the company, till Karen showed up. Usually, she arrived mid-afternoon, after a trawl round the shops with her friend Kay; because she was married, she didn’t sit with me, but we had evolved a Byzantine system of signs and prompts that allowed us to communicate back and forth across the room, a system that, nine times out of ten, was effective enough that, when the moment was right, we could slip out and meet somewhere, away from prying eyes. That day, however, she turned up just in time to witness the impromptu serenade and, when Annie broke off suddenly and slumped back into her seat to laugh at her friends, she was the first person I saw among the half-dozen amused spectators in my immediate vicinity. She had obviously just stepped through the door and (still, I thought, more or less in role) she was regarding me with what would have seemed, to an indifferent observer, nothing more than amused puzzlement. Yet something else was visible in her eyes and, for a moment, I thought she was hurt, not by some imagined romance with Annie, but by the fact that, because I was single, and a man, I could involve myself in any silliness I liked, while she had to stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but also for mine. Her husband, Patrick, was well liked by the Rangers Club heavies and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded briefly, not at me, but at the clutch of girls around the next table, then joined Kay, who had already found a free place some distance away. Kay knew, of course, but she had been sworn to secrecy – a secrecy she resented, partly because she thought I was an idiot, but mostly because her husband, Jimmy, was Patrick’s best friend and, if things ever came out, she would have some difficult explaining to do. Now and then Kay’s intense dislike of me would sometimes come to the surface, and that posed a real threat to our shabby little secret because, as everybody knows, there’s a thin line between love and hate and, sometimes, a casual observer will mistake one for the other, with potentially disastrous consequences.
My mother didn’t like television to begin with; she preferred to stay in the kitchen and listen to the radio. She would sing along with novelty items from her own era – ‘Mares Eat Oats’, say, or ‘What did Delaware, Boys?’ – but when a love song came on, she would stop peeling potatoes or sifting flour, and stand by the window to listen. One favourite, as I recall, was Andy Williams’s version of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ – which, in some ways, is the flip side to ‘I Put a Spell on You’. To fall willingly, helplessly, under that possibly malevolent spell had, to my child’s way of thinking, a troubling innocence to it and, for various reasons, that innocence has beguiled me ever since. Time and time again – helplessly, inevitably – I have rushed in ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’ (another Andy Williams favourite) and then, guilty for having made the mistake yet again, I’ve wondered vainly how to rush back out. Time and time again, I haven’t worked out how to deliver the appropriate goodbye and, like my mother, perhaps, I have waited – because, in waiting, there comes a grim satisfaction that while it isn’t quite penitence can feel awfully like it.
It’s dishonest, of course, this penitential condition. Soon, we who cannot leave our proverbial better halves begin to sneak around, helplessly smitten, or at least diverted, by some passing stranger (though in my mother’s case, I am sure, these affairs were purest fantasy, imaginary moments shared with matinee idols,fn2 newscasters and, possibly, the odd Catholic priest). The only thing to say in our defence is that we know the other’s fear is not of being left by us, as such, but of being abandoned, in the abstract, by anyone. It’s an ashes-in-the-mouth conclusion, when it comes, but it cannot be avoided and, perversely, it offers just that little bit extra to our penitential hearts: for what could be better than a banal and, at bottom, pointless sacrifice? To stay, in effect, not because the other needs me, but because he or she needs somebody, and I am better than nothing. It didn’t take long to discover that Karen was also a long-standing penitent, the bored wife who would never leave, though she probably prayed every day to be saved by some hypothetical other woman, just as, in the years that followed, I found cause to imagine the perfect other man, a suave, sinister, yet oddly likeable chap who wandered through my daydreams in an Abercrombie & Fitch scarf and Italian shoes, confident and solicitous and ultimately shallow, like some CIA operative (as played by Cliff Robertson) in an old conspiracy movie. I don’t know what kind of woman Karen imagined as her rescuer – but I suspect she imagined someone, and she knew that if this someone didn’t come soon, she would never escape.
An hour or so after Annie’s serenade, I was in a clearing in the woods behind the Civic Centre, waiting for my secret love. It was one of our special places, and we used it often: there, we could be alone and, should anyone stray from the network of paths that wound between the town centre and the new boating lake, we would hear them coming through the thick undergrowth. As usual, we had left the Charolais separately, taking different routes through town and out, past the swimming baths and the delivery area behind the Civic. I was, as always, the first to arrive and, once she knew the coast was clear, Karen followed. Kay, meanwhile, would be taking a stroll around the shops, providing the basis for whatever alibi might be needed later. It was a matter of principle for us, and perhaps even pride, that we chose to be very careful adulterers, more careful than most in that town – and I don’t doubt that we saw ourselves as both guilty and cunning in the conduct of our affair. In truth, however, we were complete innocents.
It was a warm day. Karen always looked her best on warm days; she disliked the cold, hated damp, and thin summer clothes emphasised a figure that I can only describe now, with a mixture of regret and nostalgia, as lithe. A slender, rather girlish woman in her mid-twenties, she had light brown hair and amused, searching eyes, but it was her voice I liked best, a sweet, slightly singing voice that, without a hint of affectation, could reduce me to helpless craving whenever she decided to ‘talk dirty’ (which she did, from time to time, enjoying the effect it had on me a little too obviously). Today, though, she wanted to play another game, a familiar, play-jealousy routine that I never quite knew how to take.
‘You want to watch out for Annie James,’ she said, as she emerged from the trees and came to stand facing me. ‘She’s spoken for already.’
I didn’t say anything. I just stood watching, waiting to touch her; but Karen had turned unexpectedly serious. She shook her head. ‘She’s such an idiot, that girl,’ she said.
‘How so?’
‘She’s going out with Kenny Wilson now. Which is bad enough. The thing is, Kenny hasn’t told Agnes, and when she finds out, it’s going to get nasty.’
I racked my brain. I tried to picture this Kenny Wilson, but I couldn’t place him, and I didn’t know, then, that the Agnes referred to was Agnes McCrorie, a deceptively sweet-faced woman of around thirty who had already built herself something of a reputation. I didn’t know either of them and, at the time, I didn’t care – what I wanted was the moment, now, with Karen, in the spring sunshine. ‘I’m not interested in Annie James,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m not interested in anyone but you.’ I stepped forward and put my arms around her – and she let herself be gathered in, her body warm and live against me, at once familiar and strange in a way that I could have imagined lasting forever. I touched her face and she tilted her head to be kissed but, as she did, she gave a brief, rueful smile and murmured something that I didn’t make out at first. It was only later, when we were getting ready to go, too aware of ourselves and of the possibility of someone stumbling, unexpectedly, into our hiding place, that I worked out what I’d only half heard and, when I did, the words stayed in my head for hours afterwards.
‘But I’m spoken for, too,’ she had said. Something like that – and, as with all sinners, she had allowed herself a moment’s sympathy for someone who, as unlike her as it was possible to be, was equally smitten and, one way or another, barring some momentous and unlikely good fortune, equally doomed.
I look back now and I see that, as innocent as we were – and as fascinated by the risks we were taking – Karen and I were acting as much from boredom as from romantic or physical attachment. I was a barfly, drifting from one bad deal to the next; she was a more than averagely intelligent factory worker, with a hopelessly disappointing husband and a sense that, while she knew she was too good for Corby, she also suspected that she wasn’t good enough for anywhere else. Of course, we wouldn’t have admitted it then, but we both knew that, having come together as we had, from boredom and disappointment, it was only a matter of time before we grew bored and disappointed with one another, which no doubt explains why, over the next few weeks, I found myself watching for the moment when Annie arrived at the Charolais and, from time to time, in spite of Charlotte’s sour presence, I drifted over to her table to make small talk and be friendly. I understood that she’d had no special reason for choosing me as the recipient of her voodoo serenade. It had been a piece of theatre and I had just happened to be handy, that particular Saturday afternoon. I knew I wasn’t really a character in the story Annie was telling herself about the world – and I don’t think, now, that I ever wanted to be – but I couldn’t help being drawn to her, because I sensed a mystery in her choice of song. Or, rather, there was something about the way she sang it that went beyond her initial, essentially ironic intent. Her friends had been going on about what Agnes McCrorie might do when she found out Kenny was two-timing her with a teenager, and Annie’s song, directed at a random onlooker, was her derisive response – but there was more to it than that. She had only sung a couple of lines, and the first had been harsh and mocking, but something in her voice had softened halfway through the second, so that I ain’t lying had come out more like a felt melody: wistful, sustained, almost painfully sweet. I imagine that somewhere, in school perhaps, she had discovered the power of the sustained note, and she had obviously sung like this before, for herself more than anyone – to deflect criticism, no doubt, but, at the same time, to reassert some vague hope she had, a hope that, as the songs all begged to know, and in spite of much evidence to the contrary, love is real. I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words back then, but I see now that that was what I was responding to: that hope. All any of us wanted was a chance at something new, something our parents hadn’t already failed at. A blind bit of luck. A clean break. A sense that all the fortunate sons, all the better-offs and worthies who planned our communities for us, didn’t have what they had because of some natural law which proclaimed, as it carried them along with their many blessings, that we, by contrast, were intrinsically undeserving and, so, justifiably ill-starred.
I heard about the murder on a bright Sunday morning later that spring. It was around ten o’clock and I was on my way to the shops. I had stayed overnight at my sister’s house on Station Road; Karen had planned to sneak out and find me there, but something had gone wrong and she hadn’t showed, so now I was trying to cheer myself with the old Sunday-morning routine, fetching orange juice and fresh baked goods and a pile of broadsheets to fill the gap in the day till the pubs opened at noon. I imagine Frank Cronin was doing much the same thing when we met – a lean, rather too matey former school friend with a mop of thin black hair and NHS glasses held together with Sellotape, he was one of those people for whom the unlicensed hours, no matter how well disguised with noisy activity and extravagant carry-outs, had finally become an existential problem. Seeing me outside the Spar shop, he hurried over, glad of a diversion.
‘Hey, Dicko,’ he said, using an old nickname that still made me wince. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good,’ I said, and he nodded heartily to show that he assumed I was lying. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Not much,’ he said, then added, as if it were an afterthought, ‘Some girl got stabbed outside her house, down on the Danesholme.’ He looked at me. ‘You probably know her,’ he said. ‘Annie James. She’s one of Charlotte Walsh’s friends.’
‘Annie James? When was this?’
‘Friday night,’ he said. ‘So you know her then?’
‘What happened?’
Frank gathered himself up, glad to have a small piece of drama to share. ‘It was really weird,’ he said. ‘Some bloke was walking her home and then his ex-girlfriend came out of nowhere with a knife. Just like that. Stabbed her six times, then just stood there screaming at the bloke.’ He shook his head. ‘Right outside the girl’s house, it was,’ he said. ‘In front of witnesses and everything.’
‘So – what happened?’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’
He stared at me for a moment, as if he suspected this was a trick question, then he shook his head. ‘Fuck, no,’ he said. ‘She bled out. Right on the pavement. Died before the ambulance even got there.’
I stared back. I couldn’t quite believe what he was telling me. It was too obvious. Everybody had known something would happen and now it had happened. We stood in silence for a minute or more, turning this thought over in our minds, then I looked at him. ‘What did she say?’ I asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘What did she say? The girlfriend?’
Frank began to look troubled at that point, as if he thought he’d maybe said too much. As if the girl he’d told me about mattered to me after all. Though she didn’t, of course. She was just a girl from the Charolais. ‘She was screaming at the boyfriend,’ he said. ‘From what I heard, she was saying something like, “You won’t want to kiss her now.” Something like that.’ He thought for a moment, suddenly touched by the story he was telling. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, apparently saddened and yet, at the same time, faintly impressed by this small detail. ‘You won’t want to kiss her now,’ he said again, shaking his head. ‘I mean. Fuck me.’
I saw Karen that evening, at the Open Hearth, which wasn’t that far from my sister’s house. We would go separately, of course, she with Kay and me with a friend I knew I could trust, and we would sit for a while at opposite ends of the lounge, till it felt safe enough to slip outside – me first, then her, always in that order – to talk and fumble with one another in the car park. Sometimes, we would sneak off to my sister’s; mostly, though, we plotted our next liaison in the woods, or at her house, when Patrick was on back shift or nights. We had a system for that, too: on certain days, I would walk over to hers and watch for a prearranged signal – lights going on and off in an upper room, the back door left ajar, some object placed conspicuously in a window, it was always changing. When it came, I would let myself in and find her waiting for me in the living room, behind closed curtains. A good deal of planning went into this. On that particular night, however, she found me at the shadowy edge of the car park and, stepping in close, said ‘hold me’ – and though I knew she was repeating a line she’d heard in an old movie, I also understood that something had scared her. I put my arms around her shoulders and we stood for several minutes in complete silence, not even bothering to check we weren’t being watched. Finally, she pulled away and looked up as if she wanted to tell me something. I waited. I assumed it had something to do with the murder, and her sense of a shared doom, but after a moment of trying to find the right words, Karen gave up and turned away. ‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Nothing.’
‘You heard what happened –’
She spun round. Light from a nearby street lamp fell on her face. ‘Naturally I heard,’ she said. ‘But that’s got nothing to do with us –’
‘I’m not saying it has,’ I said. ‘I just thought …’ I didn’t say any more, because I didn’t know what I thought. Or maybe I realised that what I’d thought was trite and unworthy of her.
Karen smiled, then; a wise, all-encompassing smile that was probably half real and half light-effect. ‘She was careless,’ she said. ‘They both were. Careless – and stupid.’
I shook my head. ‘It was just bad luck,’ I said. ‘Nobody could have predicted what would happen.’
She gave a soft laugh and stepped forward slightly, out of the street light, into the shadow. ‘You make your own luck,’ she said. Then she softened again, and stepped in closer, to lean against me.
I knew I shouldn’t say anything, then, but I also knew that you make your own luck was enemy wisdom, something the better-offs put about to justify their inappropriate good fortune – and I couldn’t help myself. ‘And how long does that last?’ I said.
Karen didn’t answer – but I think, at that moment, she realised, perhaps for the first time, that I’d never placed much stock in either the luck or the doom that she lived by – and a month or so later, for no good reason, we stopped seeing one another, drifting apart with a vague sense of having been disappointed, but not quite understanding how.
This far on, I can hardly picture Karen’s face at our last meeting, down by the boating lake, when we realised we had nothing left to plan for, but I see Annie James in my mind’s eye as if she had died only yesterday – and I can’t explain why I am haunted by that particular death. I never really knew Annie, and there are other killings, other ruinations, to commemorate from that time and beyond. Still, almost four decades later, it’s this one bad-luck story that stays with me. My sister and a couple of friends from that time still remember Annie as pretty, likeable, somewhat plump, and more than a little silly, but I recall a plain, fairly desperate girl with no distinguishing features other than her bright, overactive eyes – eyes that lit up, that day, when she leaned over the back of her chair in the Charolais and sang a few lines to me from one of Madeleine’s favourite songs. No doubt the association has something to do with it – after all, Madeleine was my first real crush, and I still recall the way her eyes lit up when the orchestra faded and Nina Simone started to sing. Yet something else is there, too. It’s the hint of feverishness in both their eyes, the sense I had that they were both as disappointed as I was with the life they had inherited and that they were engaged, moment by moment, in a desperate effort to reinvent the world as they went along. I didn’t really know Madeleine – I was too young and too much in awe of her – and I didn’t know Annie either, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the story. Annie’s wasn’t a particularly unusual one, but it was real, because it happened to someone I knew, more or less, and mourned, after she died, for much longer and much more deeply than anyone could have expected. It might sound sentimental to say it in so many words, but we are blessed by the dead, and we know that we are, in spite of our protestations to the contrary. They leave spaces in our lives that, for some of us, are the closest things to sacred we ever know. They are there and then they are gone and, after a time, we come to see a certain elegance in that – the elegance of a magic trick, say, where the conjuror rehearses the vanishing act that we must all accomplish sooner or later.
Nobody in my remaining circle of Charolais acquaintances remembers Agnes McCrorie. This isn’t a choice we have made; it’s got nothing to do with the tired cliché that the criminal doesn’t deserve to be remembered. I suspect that several of these old acquaintances share my there-but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling about such events. In one – and only one – sense, Agnes was luckier than some of us have been: for, even if she doesn’t recall much of what happened, she knows what her crime was, because it was witnessed and because she was punished for it. There are some for whom that knowledge never comes: we carry on through the half-lit, haunted days with the vague apprehension of some wicked act hanging in the dank tunnels of twenty or thirty years ago, a vague apprehension lit very occasionally by a sudden flash, in which a bloodied face, or a knife blade, or the strange heaviness that comes after brutal violence is almost, but not entirely, illuminated. In some cases, this partial memory is of an act that, strictly speaking, may not be classed as a criminal offence, but the shame involved isn’t about illegality; it’s about sin. I used to believe that the notion of sin was a throwback, something carried forward from Sundays and feast days, when my mother took me to Mass and we implored the pretty lady in the blue headscarf to pray for us, but I don’t think like that any more. Now, I think that if anything distinguishes us from the other animals, for better or worse, it is sin. Sin binds us to our fellow sinners, it makes us companionable, and the only people I fear are the ones who believe they are truly innocent, the ones who assume either that they are acting for the greater good of all, or that they can’t help themselves.
So, no: it isn’t righteousness that erases the killer from my memory, it is the simple fact that, like most killers, she isn’t very interesting. And this is where real life and the movies part company: in serial-killer films, even in Agatha Christie, the murderer is a nexus of fascination, often attractive or charismatic, a superior mind or a wilder soul than the other characters in the plot. In life, however, he or she is more often than not a dull, even pathetic individual, someone from whom we feel compelled to avert our eyes, quietly and almost automatically, a little ashamed of having looked in the first place and offended, somewhat, by his or her shambling ordinariness. In life, if we have souls at all, and if we are able to surrender our presumed innocence, it is the deceased who command our attention, the deceased who are glamoured by the crime, stepping briefly into the spotlight to become more interesting and complex than they ever managed to appear in their beautifully abbreviated lifetimes. It’s a bit like that game children play – our version was called Dead Man’s Fall – where they pretend to have been shot or blown up and then, in that vivid moment, can see themselves from the outside, more real, more vivid, as if perfected by a sudden flash of lightning while they strike the dying pose and hang beyond luck and doom, before falling into a place where clock time is suspended and anyone might come to grace. It’s a necessary game, a child’s version of repentance and I wish, as she crumpled and bled away at the gate to her mother’s house, that Annie could have played it in her mind’s eye, just for a moment, touched by grace and no longer aware of the heat and the noise in the bad-luck story from which she had just been acquitted.
fn1 New Towns were run, not by the Local Authority, but by an appointed Development Corporation. The Act states: ‘For the purposes of the development of each new town the site of which is designated under section one of this Act, the Minister shall by order establish a corporation (hereinafter called a development corporation) consisting of a chairman, a deputy chairman and such number of other members, not exceeding seven, as may be prescribed by the order; and every such corporation shall be a body corporate by such name as may be prescribed by the order, with perpetual succession and a common seal and power to hold land without licence in mortmain.’ The chairman at the time Corby was designated was Mr Henry Chisholm, the deputy chairman was the Rt Hon. Lord Douglas of Barloch, KCMG. A history of the Chisholm family notes that Henry was ‘knighted in 1971 for his public services, largely from 1950 on for creating and developing Corby, a new town [sic]. Henry was widely known and respected in financial and industrial circles for his many interests in several of Britain’s companies and industries.’
fn2 Her favourite was the tall, handsome Cornell University graduate Franchot Tone, whose marriage to Joan Crawford was one of the reasons for Crawford’s lifelong feud with Bette Davis. ‘She took him from me,’ Davis said later. ‘She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness. I have never forgiven her for that and never will.’
I put a spell on you. On one level, those are just words, it’s all rhetoric, like every other love song, but on another, those words hide something beautiful and dangerous and there are times when I can believe that the singer is capable of some kind of voodoo magic. In an era of more or less manufactured bedazzlement – the shorthand for which is celebrity – that sounds foolish; we are now almost obliged to forget, or to mock, the old glamourings, the variants of beauty and mania that could once bewhapefn3fn4glamorousmagicalglamourgrammaranygrimoire