As Christopher pushed on the gate, his parents’ front door opened and his mother appeared. He called a hello as he walked up the path and stepped inside. It was cold in the hallway. The smell of braised meat drifted out from the kitchen.

‘I saw you out of the window,’ Margaret said as he stepped inside. She did not kiss him or hold out her arms but stood back, rubbing her hands, in her face a worn sadness that made him too feel sad. ‘Your father’s upstairs.’

‘How is he?’

She frowned. ‘It’s been a terrible business.’

Christopher took off his coat and put it on the hook. He followed his mother into the kitchen. Her back curved more than he remembered it doing, as if she were cowering. She looked smaller.

‘You got here anyway,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He sat at the kitchen table and chafed his hands together to warm them.

His mother turned to the sink and ran the tap.

‘Why don’t you pop up and see your dad?’ she said. ‘I’ll bring tea up.’ She did not turn around.

The stairs creaked underfoot. As he neared the top, Christopher found himself slowing down. At the door to his parents’ room, he stopped, his hand on the door handle.

‘Dad?’

‘In here.’

Christopher eased open the door. It brushed on the carpet, the sound like someone breathing on glass. His father was sitting in bed, fully clothed and with a white plaster cast on his left forearm. His legs were under the covers and his head was propped up by two pillows. If the hallway had been cold, the bedroom was like a tomb. His father was wearing a woollen hat, which was not pulled down and which made a strange bulbous shape of his head. He looked, Christopher thought, miserable and quite, quite mad.

‘You made it back then,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Christopher made to sit on the bed but, seeing the outline of his father’s thin legs, thought better of it and instead sat on the chair by the window.

‘Your mother was disappointed you didn’t come home for Easter.’

‘I’m home now.’

To think, he had missed a Friday with Phyllis for this. On the bedroom floor was The Sun newspaper. His father must have followed Christopher’s gaze because he said, ‘Your mother reads me the paper.’ He held up his plaster cast, as if to explain. How a broken arm affected one’s eyesight, Christopher could not figure.

‘How is the arm?’

‘Hopeless. I’ll lose weeks. You know I’d had to take on a lad.’

Christopher nodded. A reference to his own desertion. ‘Yes, Mum said in her letter.’

‘The idiot let go of the sink while I was on all fours welding a joint – and bang! Lucky I wasn’t concussed. Lucky I wasn’t killed, to be honest. Bloody idiot.’

How being killed was any kind of tragedy for someone who took so little joy in life, Christopher struggled to see. ‘How come you’re in bed?’ he asked. ‘It’s just your arm, isn’t it?’

‘Agh.’ With his good arm, his father swiped at the air, as if to swat a fly. ‘Can’t see any point getting up. Not like I can do much, is it?’

‘You could watch television?’

‘Television’s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. If it’s not a bunch of idiots talking about things best left private, it’s some American detective twaddle.’

His mother appeared at the door with two mugs in her hands.

‘Tea,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’ Christopher stood and reached to take both mugs but his mother gave him only one. The other she took around the bed and delivered wordlessly to her husband’s bedside table before creeping out of the room in silence, like a maid. Not that his father looked in any way grand. If anything, he too looked smaller, there in the double bed, wrapped in blankets, silly hat on. They had diminished, the pair of them. They were shadows even of the shadows they had been. Christopher wondered how Jack Junior and Louise found it here in the ticking silence, wondered if they longed to get out as he had done. Once university had finished, he knew he would never live here again. Twenty minutes in the place and already a heaviness had overtaken his limbs. He wanted to shout, to run down the stairs, put on a record – loud – and pogo around the living room.

For lunch, his mother made him egg mayonnaise sandwiches. He took them on a tray with a glass of milk up to his loft room, where, in the afternoon, he studied. Later, his father conceded to dinner downstairs. Jack and Louise had by then come home from their respective friends’ houses and so there were five of them around the table once again. Jack Junior and Louise had changed too, even since Christmas; they were older, louder, bigger. They told him their news with an enthusiasm he had not experienced from them before, and he wondered if this was because he had not come back in so long. With distance, he had become a guest, a stranger before whom they put on a kind of performance of themselves. It wasn’t unpleasant – better, in fact, than indifference.

He left the next morning, Saturday, refused his mother’s offer of a lift to the coach station but accepted a carrier bag of food.

‘Thanks, that’s very kind of you.’

‘I made fudge,’ she said. She hovered over him in the dark hallway while he put on his shoes, blocking his light. When he stood straight and met her gaze, he found in it such terrible sadness that he wanted to take her into his arms and comfort her. But he did not.

‘There’s a half-pound of Lancashire cheese from the market,’ she went on. ‘It’s in the brown paper, watch you don’t squash it.’

‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

‘Take this.’ She was holding a pound note.

He waved it away. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m fine, honestly.’

‘It was only coppers,’ she said. ‘From the jar on the window ledge, like. I changed them up this week once you said you were coming.’

He had to look away.

‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Dad said he’d not be at work for a few weeks.’

‘Aye, but we’ve got some saved.’

‘Please.’ Christopher opened the front door, and with one hand holding onto the door’s edge kissed his mother on the cool bone of her cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

Margaret nodded, pushed the money into her apron pocket and closed the door behind him. At the end of the avenue, he crossed the road and turned to look back at the house. His mother was at the window, hand raised, as if she were waiting to spot him in a crowd before she could wave properly, and it seemed to him he stood on the far shore, the road he had grown up in a river, its rapid waters too wide, too turbulent to cross. He waved, turned and went on his way, but as he came to White Lund Road, he was filled with the feeling of being followed. Twice he turned back but saw no one. Then, as he waited for the coach to pull away, the feeling came again. He looked out of the window but again saw no one – at least no one he recognised. He shivered and sat back in his seat.

---

A month later, towards the end of his first year – June 1978 – Christopher wrote to Margaret and Jack to tell them he had a job in Leeds for the summer, which was the truth – a truth that omitted his reasons for taking it. Adam had organised a rental house in Leeds 6, the student area near the uni, for the following academic year. They would be sharing with two lads from the electronic-engineering course whom Christopher knew from three or four pub crawls up the Otley Road. It was Adam who had blagged the job: bar work for both of them in the Fenton, a pub behind the university. He had bounced back from the shock of Sophie’s death, but according to Christopher had calmed down when it came to women. These days, he only had one on the go at a time.

‘It’ll be a good earner,’ he was saying now. They were eating dinner together in the cavernous university refectory – the smell of stew, steamed pudding, thin coffee, the deafening clank of cutlery on cheap china. ‘Free ale too. They’re always having lock-ins there, so you’ll get extra dough, and when we’re not on shift we can spread our wings a bit, get over to Chapeltown and Bradford. Apparently the clubs there are better. We have to pay rent over the summer so we may as well live in it, eh?’

‘Quite.’ Christopher shovelled in a mouthful of partially congealed lasagne. ‘Good thinking.’

‘Sorted then. You can give me a cheque.’

‘Right you are.’

‘You ever see that Angie?’ Adam traded his clean plate of what had been steak pie and chips for a bowl of apple sponge and garish yellow custard. ‘I thought you and she had hit it off.’

‘I walked her home a few times, nothing much to say really. All the women I meet seem to be terrified of the flaming Ripper.’

‘And that’s where we come in, my friend,’ said Adam, smiling. Christopher wondered how he could be so flippant, especially after his time at the police station, after what had happened to Sophie. ‘We can see them home safe, can’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘Safe.’

---

That summer, Christopher moved his meagre belongings to Chestnut Avenue in Adam’s fourth-hand Mini. Christopher’s room was at the top of the house – Adam had given him second choice on the rooms, and only after he had chosen did he realise he had opted for the converted loft space. There was comfort in familiarity, perhaps, even if that familiarity was becoming ever more unfamiliar. He decorated the room with posters of Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac (for Phyllis). A poster of Stevie Nicks he Blu-Tacked to the sloping eave above his bed, where she could watch over him and he could look at her. Although David could get him tapes of pretty much any album he wanted, Christopher planned to save and buy a record player. There was nothing like vinyl, the sweet caress of the needle in the groove, as Adam put it. And Adam had a record player – a vintage walnut Pye Black Box – so they could trade discs.

In July, on the last Friday of the twins’ school term, Christopher made sure to go to Phyllis in the morning so that he could see her alone before the boys got home. He ran from the station to the bus stop, then from Heath Road by the town-hall grounds along to Langdale Road. He rapped on the door, looking up and down the street, checking for twitching curtains, like a thief under cover of broad daylight. The bubbles in the glass of the front door turned Phyllis into blobs of colour, and it was always wonderful when those colours cohered again to make her so clear, so young, this woman who always had a smile for him, who always threw out her arms and said: ‘Look who it is!’

He fell towards her with gratitude and relief. There was no better place on all the earth, he thought, than here.

‘Hello.’

She took his hand, as was her way, and led him into the kitchen. Once they were settled, she asked him question after question, as she always did, as if he were the most fascinating subject on the planet. How were his studies? How was Adam? Had he had any nights out? She fixed him with her brown eyes: ‘And your love life?’

‘Ah.’ He looked down at his hands, slack and useless in his lap. Memories of Angie’s naked belly flashed in his mind’s eye, the look of terror she had given him in their last moments together.

‘Good as that, eh?’ said Phyllis.

‘I’ve been pretty shaken up since Adam got taken in for questioning. It’s not just the women who are paranoid. The men are scared someone will think it’s them, and every woman you speak to, you can see in her eyes that she’s wondering if you’re a murderer or something. Not that I blame them.’ He was exaggerating his contact with the female student community, he knew, but he could not help himself. ‘But there was this girl. She seemed…’ He could not continue.

‘You can talk to me about anything,’ Phyllis said. ‘You know that.’

‘I think I mistook her intentions,’ he said eventually. ‘She seemed to want me to kiss her, and I did. She seemed to want, you know, more, but then… she said I should have stopped.’

Phyllis took his hand, and he wondered if it were possible to become addicted to a person like you got addicted to cigarettes.

‘I think perhaps it’s me,’ he continued. ‘I don’t seem to be able to get these things right.’

‘Oh, love, it’s not that. There’s all sorts of reasons why these things don’t go right. And this Ripper has got us all frightened stiff, got us all looking at the men we know, thinking, Is it you? Not over here so much, but up where you are, no one knows what they’re up to. I heard from one of the other teachers at work that there’s women accusing their own husbands. Brothers, too. The police are inundated. It’s no wonder girls your age are jumpy – and it’s not just working girls he’s after now, is it?’ She bit her lip and shook her head, seemingly lost in thought, before returning to him with another squeeze of his hand. ‘And as for you, the right girl will come along – you’ll see.’

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. ‘Some people are still kids when they fall in love or when they step into the world of, you know, sex and all the rest of it. I was fifteen, and look what happened there. That’s no good either, is it? Being made to give you up like that when you belonged with me. That’s cruel. So it may be for different reasons but I used to think the same as you – that I’d got it all wrong, that I’d not understood something fundamental about how these things work. Other girls seemed to be getting their kicks without getting into trouble, but muggins here believed him when he said he couldn’t wear a sheath. Allergic, I think he said he was. Told me not to worry, that he could control it – by which he meant pull out, I know that now, of course. And I believed him because, well, because he was older, he seemed experienced and of course he had lovely dark hair like yours and… well you can imagine.’

‘Yes,’ he said, in wonder. She was so frank, so honest, so modern. He could not imagine Margaret talking in this way, to anyone. Phyllis was the best kind of friend. Brave and generous enough to reveal herself with no more reason than to make him feel better.

‘But then I met David,’ she went on. ‘I hadn’t realised there were men out there who let you take things at your own pace. But by then I was in my twenties, don’t forget. You’re still only nineteen, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘There, see? Plenty of time for it all to come right. So don’t be worrying about all that. If this girl doesn’t want to talk to you, let her get on with it. There’s nothing you can do and it’s her loss. There’s no rush. You concentrate on getting your qualifications, and I promise the rest will fall into place, all right?’

And it was all right. He felt all right. Phyllis knew what to say. Sometimes when they parted, or even when he put the phone down, it was as if there was a physical tearing of flesh, a ripping pain such that he imagined, if he looked, he would see an open wound in his chest, blood on the ground at his feet. This was how he once described his intense love to me. I wonder now if these violent images came from this intense love alone, or from the premonition that such a love could only end in wounding, in blood. In death.

---

Back in Leeds, he called Jack and Margaret from the payphone in the Union. Jack never came to the phone, never had. Once she’d told him how Jack Junior and Louise were getting on, and about any changes in the road or down at the seafront, Margaret seemed to struggle for anything else to say. For his part, he told her nothing of Phyllis and his other family. He had not told her at the time, and now it was too late – the words were too difficult to find. Besides, to tell her after so much time had passed he feared would destroy her.

Christopher worked five shifts a week in the Fenton, a dingy place populated by alcoholics whose complexions ranged from red to purple, by lost young men who often left with men considerably older than them, and by lonely middle-aged women who sat all night on high stools at the bar, only to go home alone. Between times, he went to the Brotherton Library, trying to steal a march on the following year’s reading list. He went out with Adam when Adam wasn’t meeting a woman – once to Bradford for a curry, which they ate with their hands, once to a reggae night in Chapeltown and once to Le Phonographique, the club in the Merrion Centre. This last was a Saturday night, a night when locals emerged into the city and students, now that it was the summer holidays, were, as Adam put it, rarer than nuns in a clap clinic. At Le Phonographique they played disco music, songs and bands whose names he knew, of course, within a few bars of them beginning.

That night Adam had revisited his flared jeans and a new black shirt Christopher hadn’t seen before, along with a silver pendant necklace. The two of them stood at the side of the dance floor, drinking cheap lager and watching the predominantly female crowd.

‘ “I Feel Love”,’ Adam shouted into his ear, bobbing about, managing to somehow smoke, talk and smile at women all at once.

‘That’s nice,’ Christopher replied and was thrilled to see Adam laugh.

‘Donna Summer,’ he shouted. ‘It’s bloody magic, this one.’

Christopher felt the beat, which seemed to his ears frenetic, like panic rising. He thought of Angie, her skin. He thought of Phyllis and the way she held out her arms to him, the relief he felt whenever he was by her side.

‘Ah, love this one,’ said Adam. ‘Go on then, who is it?’

‘Parliament,’ said Christopher.

‘In one. Hold that.’ He passed Christopher his drink and headed for the dance floor.

Christopher watched his friend slink through the dancers, the rhythm informing his every move. The women responded to him as if he emanated a kind of glow, like the kids on the Ready Brek commercials, and before long, he was shouting into the ear of a woman with blonde hair flicked out in rolling waves. The next song was Blondie. Christopher sang along, under his breath, picturing Debbie Harry’s mouth, wondering what it would be like to have sex with her. He was normal in this, at least, he supposed.

Adam returned, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He took his pint and drank half.

‘Love this stuff,’ he said. It was unclear whether he meant the beer or the music. ‘What’s this one?’

‘ “Boogie Oogie Oogie”,’ said Christopher.

‘Now that’s what I call a title, man. Is that the band?’

‘That’s the song. A Taste of Honey, the band.’

‘Page the bloody Oracle.’ Adam took his cigarettes from his back pocket, offered one to Christopher, lit first his own then Christopher’s, inhaled deeply, tipped back his head and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling.

‘So tell me, oh lanky one,’ he said, ‘how come you didn’t go back home for the summer?’

‘You got us a job.’

‘I know. But that’s not the reason. And how come you’re away so much at weekends? Tell me to piss off if you like, but when you come back, you’re always so… I don’t know, happy, as if you’ve been shagging for the entire weekend. Now apart from that one time, I haven’t seen or heard about a girlfriend, and I think I have a clue as to why that might be.’

Christopher felt twin trickles of sweat run from his armpits down his sides. The club was hot, the air opaque. How could he explain, without having to explain everything? He would have to tell Adam he was adopted, that his adoptive parents had only told him because he’d found the note in the case, that now he’d found a family that he… he what? He preferred. That was it. That was the shameful truth of the matter. He had abandoned his old family like an unfashionable pair of jeans. Worse still, he had not told his new family that he hadn’t told his old family. No – too complicated. Better to say he had a woman on the go, a married woman. It was easier.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Adam clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Do you want to know why I’ve not gone home?’

Relief coursed through Christopher. He nodded.

‘My old man,’ said Adam. ‘My dad.’

For the first time Christopher could remember – ever, in fact – Adam looked serious. Serious or sad or cross – something that sent his brows towards each other, that turned his smile upside down.

‘Your father?’

‘If I tell you this, it stops here, OK?’

Christopher nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘He’s handy with his hands, if you catch my drift.’ Adam took a drag on his cigarette, drained his pint glass. ‘Violent. With my ma, but with me an’ all, like. Since I was thirteen. I feel like a shit staying here, leaving her there, but it’s her choice, she’s made it and I have to make mine.’

In the stinging smoke, Christopher looked hard at his friend. Adam had glanced away, to the dance floor, and was lighting a cigarette from the last one. He threw the old one to the floor and squashed it with his shoe. Odd, Christopher thought, that in the thick smog of the club, this was perhaps the first time he had seen his friend clearly.

‘Is he your real dad?’ The question was out before he could stop it.

Adam cocked his head. ‘Eh? Yes. Course he’s my real dad. Believe me, I’d love nothing better than for them to tell me they found me on the street, but unfortunately, no, I am their biological progeny.’ The last words he laced with irony, bitterness – something like that. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

They headed out onto Albion Street. Adam turned his talk to the women in the club, asking Christopher if he had seen her with the dark hair, what about that one with the silver dress, did Christopher think she was a man or a woman? Thankfully, they had left the subject of him, Christopher, behind. They turned into Boar Lane. Above them a white poster covered the wall, shouted down its message in bold black letters:

A man with dead eyes stared out from a crude photofit image. Adam nodded up at the sign. ‘There’s been no more since May, has there?’

‘The sixteenth,’ said Christopher. Vera Millward. Outside Manchester Royal Infirmary. He had cut out the newspaper article and stuck it in his scrapbook with the others.

‘I know.’ Adam shuddered. ‘Sick bastard. They should cut his bloody balls off, man.’

Adam pushed open the door to the Griffin pub. Christopher followed him in and headed for the bar.

‘It’s my round,’ he said. ‘Same again?’

‘Why aye. Good man. I’ll get us a table.’

Unusually, Adam chose a table in the corner, away from the others. There were no women at all in the pub, Christopher noticed as he brought the drinks over, sat down and slid Adam’s beer over to him. Taking hold of his pint, Adam made a come-here gesture with his other hand, wanting to share another confidence, no doubt.

Christopher leaned in.

‘No, you prat,’ Adam said. ‘Fags. Your turn.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘So that’s me,’ said Adam, once they’d lit up. ‘Elvis, the great pretender. I know I look like I walk on water, but that’s what comes from treading on eggshells your whole life.’ He sucked at his cigarette, blew smoke rings, met Christopher’s gaze. ‘So, buggerlugs, where do you go to, my lovely? At weekends?’

‘I…’ Christopher began, the blaze of attention making his cheeks burn. ‘It’s a long story.’

Adam put both elbows on the tabletop, rested his chin on the steeple of his hands.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘And don’t take this the wrong way. This isn’t what I think necessarily, I’m just saying it’s OK by me, that’s all. I’m not prejudiced in any way against anyone. Black, white, yellow, straight, queer, it’s all the same to me.’ He paused, met Christopher’s gaze. ‘I’m not prejudiced, is what I’m saying.’

Christopher shook his head. ‘Me neither, I don’t think.’

‘I mean, did you see that chap in the club? The one with the pink towelling headband on his bonce doing the big moves, the spins and all that malarkey?’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Adam broke his gaze, thank goodness, and rolled his cigarette tip in the ashtray so that it made a grey cone. ‘All I’m saying is, good on him. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Adam shook his head, laid his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and leaned into his ear.

‘If you’re gay, it’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’m not, but if you are, what I’m saying is, that’s cool, man.’

He leant back and smiled, and Christopher held his gaze for a second. Adam didn’t laugh. He wasn’t joking. An hour earlier, he had been one kind of person; now he was almost entirely another. How sudden the shift had been. From Adam the chancer, the dancer, the romancer, to Adam who had been beaten as a child, who when he left for university had left violence behind along with his mother, who continued to endure it. Adam who asked for confidences, who promised not to judge. With the exception of Phyllis, he was possibly the kindest person Christopher had ever known. He was still looking right at Christopher, so serious, so unlike himself, but, it was possible, utterly himself, the self he normally kept under wraps. That was what he was offering: himself – the real one.

Christopher felt a smile creep across his lips. The smile widened.

‘What?’ said Adam. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? It’s OK, man, it’s OK. And I won’t tell either.’

From nowhere, Christopher exploded into laughter. Tears leaked from his eyes, his stomach hurt, he tried to speak but could not. Adam laughed too, but doubtfully.

‘Mate,’ he said. ‘People are staring. Get a grip, will you?’

‘I-I’m not,’ Christopher stuttered, when he was able. ‘I’m not gay.’

‘What? What then?’

‘It’s my mother,’ he said. ‘My real mother. That’s where I go at weekends.’