Louise cooks the lunch while Bobby and I play with his car and bricks, his Action Man and Tonka Toy, his Lego and teddies, the Royal Flotilla coming down the Thames on the TV.
We eat fish in breadcrumbs, drenched in parsley sauce and ketchup, with chips and garden peas, and jelly for pudding, Bobby wearing his dinner medals with pride.
After, I do the dishes and Louise and Bobby dry, the TV off before the news.
Then we have a cup of tea and watch Bobby showing off, dancing on the settee to an LP of Bond themes.
On the drive over to Leeds, Louise and Bobby sit in the back and Bobby falls asleep with his head in her lap, the sun baking the car, the windows open, listening to Wings and Abba, Boney? and Manhattan Transfer.
We park round the back and I lift Bobby out and we walk round to the front of the hospital, the trees in the grounds almost black in the sun, Bobby’s head hanging over my shoulder.
In the ward we sit on tiny hard chairs, Bobby still asleep across the bottom of his Grandad’s bed, as Louise feeds her father tinned tangerines on a plastic spoon, the juice dribbling down his unshaven face and neck and over his striped Marks & Spencer pyjamas, while I make aimless trips to the trolley and the toilet and flick through women’s magazines and eat two Mars Bars.
And when Bobby wakes up about three, we go out into the grounds, leaving Louise with her father, and we run across the bouncy grass playing Stop and Go, me shouting, ‘Stop,’ him shouting, ‘Go,’ the pair of us laughing, and then we go from flower to flower, sniffing and pointing at all the different colours, and when we find a dandelion clock we take it in turns to blow away the time.
But when we go back upstairs, tired and covered in grass stains, she’s crying by the bed, him asleep with his mouth open and his dry cracked tongue hanging out of his bald shrunken head, and I put my arm round her shoulder and Bobby rests his head upon her knees and she squeezes us tight.
On the drive back home, we sing nursery rhymes with Bobby and it’s a pity we had fish for lunch because we could have stopped at Harry Ramsden’s for a fish supper or something.
We bath Bobby together, him splashing about in the bubbles, drinking the bathwater, crying when we take him out, and I dry him and then carry him up to our room and I read him a story, the same story three times:
‘Once upon a time there was a rabbit, a magic rabbit who lived on the moon.’
And half an hour later I say:
‘Magic telescope, magic telescope, please show me Yorkshire…’
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
Chapter 14
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.