Читать книгу Ploughing Potter’s Field - Phil Lovesey - Страница 8

Someone once remarked that I had a certain stillness in my eyes. And that no matter how much my face animated itself around them, it was as if they were disconnected from the surrounding expression.

The description unnerved me, partly because I was trying my best to bed the girl in question and now knew she found me to be somewhat strange and disconnected, but also because it was something I’d noticed myself as an adolescent counting spots in front of the mirror.

Another contemporary way back had told me that if you stared hard enough at your reflection, you’d find the devil grinning back. I tried – and found nothing. Just the stillness.

Others too, have sometimes remarked on my eyes. Sad, they’ve been called, empty, even vacant. I began to study eyes, staring intently with my own duff specimens at others, determined to learn their tricks, syphon some of their vitality. I became expert at eye-widening shock, practised arching my eyebrows for various different studied effects. But however I tried to mask the lifelessness, it remained.

Although to be fair, this optical handicap had its advantages. While some thought I was weird, an equal number were intrigued, or took pity, determined to unlock the secrets behind my flat, staring irises. And to a certain extent, I played along with their games, inventing a variety of instant tragic pasts to gain their sympathy, friendship, sexual favours, or all three. I was in my late teens, insecure, fuelled by hormones, so I can forgive myself for the deception.

But the eyes have stuck. Still as vacant today as when I first perceived them. But now I have knowledge. I know they weren’t always this way. They saw something which denied them their vigour. Then spent thirty years colluding with my subconscious to deny me the memory.

And when I began speaking to Rattigan, the lid to Pandora’s box began to lift a little. His taunts of ‘Fat-boy’ were the catalyst, taking me back to my schooldays, when I was frequently bullied over my weight – which I only very recently recognized was another complex psychological mechanism I’d constructed in order to forget.

For me, the term ‘hindsight’ is the cruellest of puns, but I’m forced to admit it played its part. For the first time in my life, I can really ‘see’, trace the causes of who I was, who I am now, and what happened in between. I see now what I saw then, and realize why the life drained from my eyes.

To begin at the beginning, I nearly killed my own mother before I’d even drawn breath.

Rawlings family legend has it that on the seventh of March 1958, I caused a twenty-two-hour labour, a badly administered epidural and thirty-seven stitches on the poor woman during my sweating, straining way into the world. Something about my head being too big, her feet too small, though I can’t say for certain. Mum and Dad are both dead now, and even though I was present at the birth of both of my own children, I’m still woefully ignorant of the precise biological processes which place a mother’s life in danger as she dilates, contracts and finally bears another life.

More of my mother. Gwendoline Sullivan was much younger than my father, theirs being the almost clichéd match between smitten secretary and stoical boss. She was twenty-three when she married George Rawlings – he a handsomely mature forty-two. And from what I remember, it was that most rare of combinations, a marriage which seemed to truly work. That she loved him utterly, I am totally convinced. Many’s the time I remember to this day the looks she gave, meals she tenderly prepared, dresses she wore in order to please him.

We lived in Swindon. Dad still worked as boss of a small firm of accountants where he had effortlessly wooed his future wife, while Mum stayed put to look after his son. At the time I felt the almost daily trips to his office to take his sandwiches for lunch were surely just another fine example of my parents’ devotion to each other. It was only later that I wondered if Mum was truly happy playing housewife while Dad went to work with his new secretary. Not that anything untoward ever happened, I’m sure. Dad simply wasn’t the type, but I think Mum must have had her suspicions.

Unfortunately, I inherited my mother’s physical genes. Dad stood well over six foot, Mum barely managing to break the five-foot barrier in high heels. I was chubby, too, having none of Dad’s lean wiry physique, and of course, after the birth episode, was destined to be an only child. Sometimes, in the darker moments, I’d lie awake wondering if my loneliness was appropriate punishment for the distress I’d unwittingly caused my mother.

However, any hopes my father had that he’d somehow sired the future heavyweight champion soon withered away as I fell victim to numerous childhood ailments. But, as most fathers do. Dad looked straight through my chubby pallid scrawn, convinced I had the makings of a professional footballer. He’d tried out for Swindon Town as a youngster, and wouldn’t accept I hadn’t inherited his own magic left foot. Most Saturday afternoons would find us at the local ground, me struggling to see above a sea of heads at the exotic green turf beyond.

They were the best of times, made better when my dad would lift me confidently on to his broad shoulders to catch key moments of the game. I’d sit there, elevated, giving my own childish commentary to the action, hands clinging to his ears and thinning hair, feeling him sway slightly if Town scored, bonded.

Often, he’d carry me aloft as we walked back home, weaving through thousands of jubilant or disgruntled fans, nodding at friends – feeling literally ‘on top of the world’.

My bedroom became a temple to the Town, covered in posters, programmes, scarves, away-ticket stubs and league tables. At the age of nine I knew no times-tables, but all of Swindon Town’s cup-winning teams by rote. Dad always put me to bed with tales of the ‘great’ games, vivid descriptions and I clung on to every word.

It was only in later life that my mother’s indifference to the Town began to make sense. I think she resented the hold it had on Dad, perhaps even saw me as a rival for his time and affection. But these are suppositions I can only make with hindsight. An attempt to understand why she appeared distant at times. Perhaps I was the son my father always wanted, which my mother dutifully supplied, who then took her place in his heart. Whatever – I’ll never know, they’re both long gone, and all I’m left with is a frustrating mix of unanswered speculation and distant memories.

I suppose my childhood split itself into two parts. The happy times up till the age of nine or so, then the confusing times after. Dad changed, became withdrawn, older, somehow more fragile. We didn’t go to matches any more, I went with friends, while he sat at home, listening to the radio. But it was no gradual slowing down, it simply happened one weekend, almost as if he’d been replaced by an apathetic, stooping doppelgänger during the night.

I continued following the often disastrous footballing antics of the Town for the rest of the season, returning home to give my indifferent dad an increasingly lacklustre match report, but to be honest, without his enthusiasm, my heart was in it even less than his. Down came the scarves, posters and wall-charts, up went Jane Fonda as Barbarella.

And I too, began to change. My weight ballooned, skin stretching under the constant ingestion of crisps and sweets. My eyes took on their now familiar stillness. I went from a slim young boy into a blob, cocooned from a terrible truth I hadn’t the will or maturity to deal with. The subconscious took over, remoulding me, distancing me from such things I hadn’t the developed intellect to face. And it’s only now, all these years later, as the terrible truth emerges blinking into the sunlight of my new reality, that the choices I have made, the things I’ve done, the hurt I’ve caused others all fit so hideously elegantly into place.

I didn’t eat three Mars Bars every day because I wanted to – it was because I needed to. The promised work, rest and play disguised a deeper, darker need – to forget. And the calories did their job, protecting me from the outside, wrapping me in comforting fat, giving me time to heal before I had the strength to go back and face what had so quickly and violently destroyed both my father’s and my own innocence.

But I digress. Back to the potted biography. Next it was eleven-plus, special tutoring and a place at the Boys’ Grammar. School caps, long lines of fragile little boys lugging briefcases designed for grown-ups, stuffed with battered text and exercise books. Eng. Lang., Eng. Lit., Geography, Art, French, German, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Latin, detention, the cane, school reports, fear, and football. I remember my dad extolling my laughably nonexistent sporting virtues at my interview as a huge ape in a Loughborough tracksuit sneered in anticipation of towel-whipping me in the showers. Which he did, many times.

As expected, I was average at just about everything, with the exception of sport. Here, I seemed to excel as an uncoordinated dunderhead, but being one of the widest, if not tallest, boys in my year, I was made substitute goalkeeper in the St Barts third team. I remember Dad would occasionally make a reluctant trip out to the school touchline, joining other rain-sodden parents jeering my efforts as the ball skidded past me into the back of the net. And always after, during the journey home, few words would pass between us, yet I sensed his disappointment. It was a world away from the distant days when he’d lift me on those once broad shoulders, now stooped and rounded by time.

Moving on, past A levels towards 1976, my first job – tea-boy in a provincial advertising agency. The name’s irrelevant, so was the job. Amazingly, I lost three stone, my virginity, discovered pot, the music of The Doors, Yes and Genesis. I wore flares and discovered a gift for mimicry and joke-telling which won me many friends my age, but few amongst the management. I had a weekly wage and all the brash confidence of youth. I was impregnable, bolstered by hormones and arrogance.

Then fired for skinning up in the toilets.

London beckoned, and I Dick Wittingtoned to its heady call, winding up as a junior copywriter in a ‘mainstream’ ad agency on Dean Street.

Jemimah Eliott arrived, full of my imagined Eastern European promise, our brand-new hotshot account handler. I wrote the copy for the ads she presented to the clients. I went to one or two of these presentations, watching her wage a professional charm offensive on our clients in order to bolster the agency’s profits. She was good, very good, young, attractive. I fancied her like mad, but thought I had no chance. But we used to laugh a lot together, swapping gossip and tall stories about the guys with their own parking spaces who were for ever offering to take her away for a ‘formative think-tank regarding agency strategy for the forthcoming new business pitch’ – adspeak for a quickie in a hotel on expenses.

The senior rejected suits had, of course, discovered the source of their failure to bed her. Jemimah Eliott was, in their hugely embittered opinions, obviously a muff-muncher, rabid dyke, prick-teaser. I remember nodding sagely, laughing inside at their broken egos.

Then one day, just another unremarkable Wednesday, she came to brief me on some job or other. At the end she asked me out. As simple as that, just went staight ahead and asked. Unbelievable – but true.

We married in nineteen-eighty – me twenty-two; her twenty-three; two young kids standing at the altar, backs to the world of temptation and drudgery which lay waiting outside the church.

We agreed I would move to another agency, figuring working and living with one another wouldn’t necessarily make the ideal platform for a successful relationship. But perhaps we hadn’t fully thought it through. Trouble was, we still worked in the same business, only now we were professional rivals. Then disaster – in April 1987, my agency lost a major bit of business to hers. Jemimah was on the pitch team. Word soon got round. I was suspected of leaking details by a paranoid management reeling from the loss of a major blue-chip account. I was history shortly after, summoned by a phone call to a meeting with the smiling executive where a lukewarm pot of coffee, my P45 and a derisory payoff were the only things on the table.

I felt numb, made completely impotent by the decision. Not that the drop in money affected J and I in the slightest – in a bizarre irony, she’d been promoted to the board of her agency as a result of winning the business I’d been unfairly suspected of losing. We were richer than we’d ever been.

At first we were cool about it, spending the redundancy and planning a heavy freelance career from the ruins of my Filofax. One or two jobs rolled in, charity from old pals, giving Adrian the odd hundred quid here or there. But I grew to hate every minute of it. My heart wasn’t in it; I couldn’t bear to think of Jemimah leaving for work, while I sat upstairs in the heavy silence, de-roled, emasculated.

Like an idiot, I began to drink heavily, from the moment J left for the station until she returned, often finding me bombed on the sofa, useless. Days, time, dates, all became irrelevant as I woke each day with the sole aim to hit the whisky hard, dull the pain of failure. A never-ending supply of child-minders and nannies looked after Juliet and Guy, our two children, while I set about following a self-indulgent path to oblivion. It was crazy – a very dark and stupid time. I did things of which I’m still not proud, which even now I can’t fully explain or understand – but perhaps this is born out of a reluctance to do so.

There are some parts of all of us, I now recognize, which are graphically revealed in a crisis, and need one hell of a lot of honesty to accept. Even now, I have problems with the swiftness of my metamorphosis from happy-go-lucky copywriter to unstable drunk. I shudder at the ease with which I was unravelled.

Then came the move to Essex. Jemimah took charge and issued the ultimatum. She’d had enough. The family was moving from London. I could go with them, or stay and drink myself to death, but without her money or support. I was devastated, and in the selfish way alcoholics have, grew to hate her for making me choose.

Friends began calling less often, nervous of my unpredictable behaviour. Letters from estate agents began arriving. I was sleeping in the spare room when I could be bothered to get off the sofa. I had nothing in my life but alcohol.

One afternoon, Jemimah arrived back to tell me she’d exchanged on a place near Chelmsford. We had a God Almighty argument. And I hit her.

To this day, I hate myself for that drunken blow. She reeled back, shock and pain writ large on her reddening face. Juliet, our eldest, began to cry. I stormed out, spent two nights with a former colleague who persuaded me to get help. Thank God he did.

The message was stark. I was an alcoholic. Always would be. In less than six months I’d gone from a bloke who could have a couple of pints and leave, to someone who couldn’t face the day unless he had three large whiskys to take the edge off it. The only solution was to deny myself the solution. Either that or lose everything.

There were others there, that night. Broken individuals with similar tales, some spanning many years – but always at the heart, I felt, was a reluctance to look inside and face a particular truth which the alcohol blurred. I didn’t have the strength to face mine, preferring instead to soak up the group support, start the road to abstinence, persuade Jemimah that I recognized the problem, had taken steps to tackle it, was convinced I would beat it.

God love her – she tentatively agreed to ‘take me back’. I began the painful process of working out what I wanted to ‘do’ with the rest of my life, finally realizing what a privileged position I was in. I could start again, a new life, new friends, new interests, a phoenix rising from the ruins of my own self-destruction. And after a few weeks settling into our new home I was off the sauce, had joined a local gym and, more importantly, had the answer to my new direction.

During the move to Chelmsford, I’d rediscovered an old hoard of crime magazines I’d collected as a youngster, sensational articles offering a tabloid insight into the minds and motives of the evil perpetrators. Rereading them, I found myself fascinated by both the crimes and criminals, wondering what lay at the heart of the human psyche. It seemed incredible to me that humanity, universally acknowledged as an exploratory creature, could put a man on the moon without ever having fully explored his mind.

What shapes the most deviant individuals – brain dysfunction, environmental factors, the past, or perhaps a fatal cocktail of all three? Or is it simply that some of us are born with a terrifying predilection for evil?

The questions fought for space in my mind, as I began to realize I was developing an obsession with human psychology. I began subscribing to modern crime mags, immersing myself in the twisted worlds of current-day serial killers and psychopaths, child-murderers, Satanists and worse. And yet it seemed to me that the more I ‘discovered’ the less I actually knew. Each publication was merely concerned with sensational grisly details to ensure higher sales. Indeed, sometimes I found myself wondering about the appetite for such bloodthirsty material, speculating that perhaps we hadn’t actually evolved all that much since thousands turned up to witness a handful of Christians thrown to hungry lions.

But I too, was hooked. I may have tried to cloak my interest in academic terms, convincing myself I had superior motives for buying the glossy mags and tabloids, but the result was the same, I paid my money – I participated in the voyeuristic merchandising of insanity and pain.

Then one day – a breakthrough. Waiting in Chelmsford Central Library to check out another volume dedicated to the ongoing mystery of Jack the Ripper, I began leafing through a local prospectus. The University of Essex offered a reasonably well-thought-of degree in psychology. Perhaps this was a start then, a move in the right direction. After talking it over with Jemimah, we agreed I should apply. She was still happy enough working at the agency, and provided I really was serious about it, she’d fund my enthusiasm. I was taken on as a mature student the following September.

I worked harder than I’d ever done, couldn’t get enough of the subject, eating up theories, devouring vast textbooks, ingesting all that was said in every lecture and tutorial. I was motivated, sober, deliriously happy with my second shot at life.

Former friends visiting the Rawlingses’ Essex retreat for dinner would often make the mistake of complimenting me on my willpower, watching as I drank mineral water while they knocked back the hard stuff. I was always quick to correct them. It had nothing to do with willpower – fear was the key. I’d already teetered at the edge of my sanity once, nothing would persuade me to do so again. Or so I thought at the time.

Three years later, the BA (hons) became an MA, with Dr Clancy telling me I had the talent to ride it all the way to PhD in forensic psychiatry if I wanted to.

I dedicated myself to finding a thesis subject. There was so much to choose from, but eventually decided to settle on the media’s easy obsession with ‘evil’, and the damage it caused to proper psychological investigation. I worked hard. Cases like the Wests’, Dunblane and numerous others seemed to spring from quiet suburban backwaters almost every month as I toiled away on my researches. And as each horrifying case broke, I found myself ever more on the ‘side’ of the perpetrators, rationalizing that there had to be some concrete reasons why they’d done whatever they’d been accused of. Concrete beyond the media’s constant assertion that they were simply ‘evil’, anyway.

Next I learnt that the Home Office had agreed to partially fund a series of PhD students through their thesis years if they participated in a national data-gathering exercise for a brand-new law-enforcement initiative identifying behavioural characteristics of incarcerated psychopaths.

Or, as Fancy put it, they’d stump up a few readies if I agreed to ask a nutter some personal questions. The programme had been up and running for a few years, and research gathered had apparently proved invaluable in lobbying the relevant parties for a change in the judicial understanding of random violence.

‘Bugger it, Adrian,’ Fancy’d said by way of explanation. ‘You only have to look at the States to see what a balls-up they’re making of it. Defence attorneys are pressing for the admission of “the crime gene” in order to get their psychos out of the death chamber. Like the murdering sods are somehow born to kill, genetically programmed, so it’s not their fault. Preposterous!’

‘And you say what?’ I replied. ‘That every lunatic is morally responsible for the actions he commits?’

‘We’re not that far, Adrian. We need more data. Will you do it? It’s bang up your street, nature of evil and all that.’

My thesis, the magnum opus – The acceptance of Evil as a resultant supernatural force actively prohibits positive psycho-social studies into the internal and external factors influencing random, unmotivated violence’ by Adrian Rawlings (soon to be) PhD.

So I agreed, both trepidacious and excited. Here was a chance to actually step inside a secure mental institution, converse with an inmate, form some kind of temporary relationship, perhaps even finally come to terms with what lured me to the analysis of violence in the first place.

It had been bothering me for some time, silently, something I tried my best to suppress, keep from friends and family. But late at night, while I worked in the gloom of a computer screen, it was always there, a warning keen to be heard and analysed, a fear which had wound its way effortlessly into my psyche, mocking my attempts to reinvent myself over the last ten years.

Maybe longer. The longer I worked at trying to understand the human mind, the more I began to analyse my own. I was finally beginning to have some understanding of my own inadequacies. The reason I had drunk so passionately was a good deal greater than simply hitting my thirties, redundant and shit-scared. No – it was for far simpler, far darker reasons. The more I drank, the less I needed to answer the real questions gently swelling and beginning their way up from deep down inside. Questions I’d buried from childhood and adolescence. Questions which the redundancy had thrown up, and which I feared would never go away.

Fancy duly put my name forward to Dr Neil Allen at HMP Oakwood High Security Mental Hospital, and after a short submission on my part detailing my willingness to compile relevant data regarding antisocial behaviour disorders, I was duly accepted and funded.

‘Game on!’ Fancy had beamed when telling me the good news. ‘A year from now and I’ll be calling the man “Doctor”.’

Fancy rang late the following Thursday night.

‘He’s gone for it, Adrian.’

‘Rattigan?’ I answered nervously.

‘Wants to see you tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Shit! So soon?’

‘Told you he would. They all do.’

‘Jesus. Tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry. Pop into the uni. on the way. See me before ten. I’ll give you all you need to know. And Adrian?’ His voice was deadly serious. ‘Remember, you get in, you do this, you get out. You’re the boss. It only becomes a game when you agree to play it.’

‘But there’s so much about him that …’

‘Shouldn’t concern you, Adrian.’

I heard what he said, understood his warning, yet knew following the advice would be difficult, if nigh on impossible.

I was an idealistic mature student with a head full of theories and expectations. Rattigan fascinated me for one reason alone. He claimed to have killed for no other motive than his own self-satisfaction. He’d had ‘fun’ dispensing slow death.

Why couldn’t I heed all the warnings and simply accept this? What drove me to rationalize his monstrous act within my own understanding? Personal ambition? A desire to be recognized as a great forensic psychologist?

Or something else entirely?

It wasn’t that Rattigan held the answers, I did. But at the time, I was too scared to face the questions.

To date, neuropsychological studies of offenders have been blighted by small samples, lack of controls and an emphasis on institutionalized populations. However, results from such studies indicate that both poor language skills and impairment of the regulative functions controlled by the frontal lobes are consistent factors in the analysis of sociopathic antibehavioural disorders.

At present, it is almost impossible to gauge whether either factor is the result of developmental damage or neurological failure, and more work needs to be done in order to understand the complex correlation between the two.

However, current thinking suggests that many forms of sociopathic and psychotic behaviours can possibly be explained by the ineffectiveness of the subject’s ‘inner voice’, or learned morality, to temper violent outbursts.

Put simply – they appear to do what they want, to whom they like, as and when mood takes them.

Dr Neil Allen

(The Roots of Psychopathy)