And this time he doesn’t make a telescope with his hands, this time he just makes wet smacking sounds with his lips, and I kiss him night-night and go downstairs.
Louise is sitting on the settee watching the end of Crossroads.
I sit down next to her, asking, ‘Anything good on?’
She shrugs, ‘Get Some In, that XYY Man thing you like.’
‘Is there a film?’
‘Later, I think,’ and she hands me the paper.
‘I Start Counting?’
‘Too late for me.’
‘Yeah, should have an early night.’
‘What time you on tomorrow?’
‘John was going to call.’
Louise looks at her watch. ‘You going to call him?’
‘No, I’ll just go in for seven.’
We sit and watch Max Bygraves, Bobby’s toys between us.
And later, in the adverts before World in Action, I say, ‘Do you think we can get over this?’
‘I don’t know love,’ she says, staring at the TV. ‘I don’t know.’
And I say, ‘Thanks for today.’
I must have fallen asleep because when I wake up she’s gone and I’m on the settee alone, I Start Counting ending, and I turn off the TV and go upstairs, get undressed and get into bed, Bobby and Louise beside me, sleeping.
In my dream I was sitting on a sofa in a pink room. A dirty sofa with three rotting seats, smelling worse and worse, but I couldn’t stand.
And then in the dream I was sitting on a sofa in a playing field. A horrible sofa with three rusty springs, cutting into my arse and thighs, but I couldn’t stand, couldn’t get up.
And then in the dream I was sitting on a sofa on wasteground. A terrible sofa thick with blood, seeping up into my palms and nails, but I still couldn’t stand, still couldn’t get up, still couldn’t walk away.
The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Saturday 11th June 1977
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and started to pull on my trousers.
It was dawn, grey and wet, Saturday 11 June 1977.
The dream hung like a lost ghost across her gloomy backroom, a dream of bloodstained furniture and fair- haired coppers, crime and punishment, holes and heads.
Again, bruised from sleep.
The windows rattled with the rain, my stomach with them.
I was an old man sitting on a prostitute’s bed.
I felt a hand on my hip.
‘You don’t have to go,’ she said.
I turned back round to the bed, to the sallow face on the pillow, and I leant in to kiss her, taking off my trousers again.
She pulled the sheet over us and opened her legs.
I put my left thigh between them, her damp on the skin and hair of my leg as I ran my hand through her hair, feeling again for the mark that he’d left.
I drove back to Leeds through morning traffic and continued showers, the radio keeping her at bay:
Widespread flooding expected, John Tyndall – the leader of the National Front – punched, 3,287 policemen left without a pension or gratuity, journalists’ strike to intensify.
When I reached the dark arches, I switched off the engine and sat in the car thinking of all of the things I wanted to do to her, a cigarette burning down to the skin just below my nail.
Bad things, things I’d never thought of before.
I stubbed out the cigarette.
The office, empty.
Bored, I picked up today’s paper and re-read my inside piece:
THE VICTIMS OF A BURNING HATE?
Background by Jack Whitehead
It’s becoming an all-too-familiar scene for the luckless residents of the so-called ‘red light’ district of Chapeltown, Leeds:
A mobile police command post, a towering radio mast, a noisy generator, cordoned-off roads, detectives with clipboards knocking on doors, and children peeping through curtains at endless blue lights.
The fifth woman savagely murdered in the middle of the night in the last two years, the fourth within a two-mile radius, was immediately marked down as the latest victim of a killer who has become known as Yorkshire’s own ‘Jack the Ripper.’
Rachel Johnson, sixteen, like the others, was savagely attacked. Like two of the earlier victims her body was found in a playground-type area, a place for fun and games, and Rachel was also only a few hundred yards from her home.
The major difference between Rachel, who only left school at Easter, and the previous victims was that the others were known prostitutes operating in the Chapeltown area.
But Rachel may have made the same fatal mistake as the others – accepting a lift in a stranger’s car after an evening out – something the police say they have repeatedly warned against since the first of the murders in June 1975.
The first prostitute victim of a man the police believe is a psychopath with a burning hatred of women was a 26-year-old mother of three, Mrs Theresa Campbell, of Scott Hall Avenue, Chapeltown.
A milkman on his early morning rounds found Mrs Campbell’s partly-clothed bloodstained body on the Prince Philip Playing Fields, only 150 yards from her home where her three young children were anxiously waiting for their mummy to return from ‘work.’
She had been savagely stabbed to death.
Five months later on the other side of the Pennines, Clare Strachan, a 26-year-old mother of two, was brutally beaten to death in Preston, a crime police now consider to be the work of the same psychopath.
Just three months later, in February 1976, Mrs Joan Richards, a 45-year-old mother of four, also met a brutally violent death, this time in a little-used Chapeltown alley.
Mrs Richards, who lived at New Farnley, had been beaten brutally about the head and repeatedly
