With the Ripper at large, it was no wonder they were all paranoid – Christopher, Adam, those girls. The whole country was in the grip of it. I remember the feeling of dread. Dread. If I could bring myself to speak, that would be the word with which I might start. Maybe the question is not how are you feeling but what are you feeling? That I could answer. I need nouns, not adjectives: guilt, shame, regret. If you can’t talk, then write. At first I couldn’t, the meds were too strong, but bit by bit I’ve crawled my way towards it, and now that I’ve started, I find I can’t stop. I look forward to it – or do I? Is it simply a habit I can’t break, like a biscuit with a cup of coffee?

When I think about Christopher volunteering to be Adam’s alibi, I realise that was a turning point for him. Something was sealed between them in that crucial moment. Without it, would they ever have had their evening of confidences and become so very close? Needless to say, this kind of friendship was new to Christopher. He’d already told me that he’d not had a best friend at school nor a lover of any real kind – it’s only now that I find myself thinking about that and wondering why I didn’t think about it more at the time. And as with anything good that happened to him now, he wondered whether Phyllis lay at the root, whether having found someone like her had opened him wide enough to allow room for someone like Adam.

‘I wonder if friendship or love or whatever is not a finite thing but something that under the right conditions grows and multiplies; you know, like cells in a Petri dish,’ he once said to me.

I know he looked forward to Adam getting home from his evening shifts, when they would make tea and toast and smoke and talk, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. In these moments, as with Phyllis, he felt a warmth that was physical, he told me, as if his insides had been lined with fur.

Adam’s father drank – too much, it transpired during one of their many long conversations. He was a miner; the work was hard and dirty, the conditions poor.

‘He’s got emphysema now,’ said Adam, one leg over the armchair in their student kitchen-cum-living-room. ‘Won’t see fifty. Most of his life spent underground, and for what? Couldn’t even take joy in raising his kids. Hates the fact I got to uni, hates it. Couldn’t stand the sight of me then – now, well…’

‘My father’s a bit that way,’ Christopher confessed. ‘I think he’d prefer it if I knew how to unblock a drain or wire a plug.’ He stared into his tea. The merest grey tinge of the meniscus broke when he put his mouth to it. ‘Words were what did for my family,’ he added, voicing a thought he had not known was there. ‘The lack of them anyway. If they’d spoken to me sooner, I wouldn’t have grown up feeling like a guest in my own house. Like an imposter.’

Adam was at that point the only person who knew about the situation regarding both of Christopher’s families

‘I can see how you’ve ended up where you are,’ he said after a moment. ‘But sooner or later it might be best to tell Jack and Margaret. These things have a way of coming back to bite you on the arse.’

‘I will,’ Christopher replied. ‘One day, when I find the right moment, I’ll tell them everything.’

In this way, late into the night, they unfolded their worlds like maps, the better to study their roads, rivers and contours. Like this, they hoped, they would be able to find their way through to something clearer – a destination of sorts.

---

It was in the August of that summer that Christopher went with Phyllis, David and the boys to Pembrokeshire. They had rented a bungalow in Tenby, in the grounds of a farm. Inside, the rooms smelled faintly of damp – a homely smell once the gas fire was lit, an alarming process involving a taper, the leaning back with one’s arm outstretched and the waiting for a loud woof as the gas blew orange.

‘Bloody hell,’ were David’s words the first evening, after he had succeeded in lighting the fire. ‘Nearly took my bloody eyebrows off, that thing.’

Outside, chickens scratched at the courtyard and, in the communal garden, a rather forlorn badminton net sagged between two trees. Phyllis pronounced the place perfect, and while David went off exploring with the boys, Christopher helped her to unpack. She had brought foodstuffs in a cardboard box and in the quaint pine kitchen brought out a brick-like object wrapped in foil.

‘Do you like fruit cake, Chris?’ She smiled at him and wiggled her eyebrows in mischief.

‘I love fruit cake.’

‘What say you and I have a piece with a cuppa, while the others aren’t looking?’

He smiled back, the lightness, almost fizziness he felt around her returning as it always did.

‘Sounds like a good idea.’ He made to sit down but stopped himself. ‘Ah, I almost forgot.’ From his jacket pocket he pulled the gift he had brought for her. ‘I made this tape for you. It’s from Adam’s record collection actually. It’s a selection of disco hits. I know you like disco.’

Phyllis cooed with delight and dashed to fetch the portable tape player she had brought. After a moment of static, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ pulsed in the cramped space. Immediately Phyllis threw up her arms so that her bright green T-shirt rose up, exposing her white belly, her belly button. She danced like that around the kitchen.

‘I love it!’ she cried. ‘What else is on here?’

‘Everything,’ he shouted over the music. To watch her dance around, grinning like a fool was to be filled with joy. She was a miracle.

‘Chris, love, you’re an angel.’ She bent, took his face in her hands and kissed him on the cheek. He closed his eyes, but she had already let go, and when he opened them she was twirling around the kitchen again, lifting the kettle from the hob now and parading around with it like one of Pan’s People. She filled the kettle with water, her bottom wiggling in her tight blue jeans. She held the kettle to the skies, spun and placed it back on the hob. With a flourish she lit the gas with a match, blew it out with a wink.

‘Come on, Chris,’ she cried out to him. ‘Dance with me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can, don’t be soft.’

She rounded the table and pulled him up, took his hand and put her other hand on his waist. She rocked one way, then the other, and despite himself, he followed her. He had no choice – she was leading. He thought, could not help but think, of Angie.

‘All right,’ he said, his voice loud under the low ceiling, and pushed Phyllis back from him. Determined to lead, to show her he could, he kept hold of her hand as he had seen Adam do with women in the clubs. She laughed and spun back, wrapping his arm around her as she went, then unwinding again, letting go of him. She continued to dance, waving her fingers at him as she backed away, laughing when she banged her backside against the dresser. The song changed – three beats in and she shouted:

‘ “Best of My Love”!’ Her voice was still high. There was real glee in it, he thought. ‘I love this one!’

He did his best to dance alongside her. He had the beat but could not make it part of him like she could.

‘That’s it,’ she said, taking his hands in hers and moving them in time, but at the sweetness of it, at her proximity and her joy, he felt himself beginning to panic. His heart raced, his eyes prickled. He could not look at her. After a beat or two more, he broke from her and went to turn down the music – blew back his fringe, as if out of breath.

‘You’ll wear me out,’ he said, sitting down at the table.

She stopped dancing and came to join him. She sat down and drank her tea, and for a moment he was filled with regret at having spoiled her dance. The music had fallen away to no more than tinny percussion.

‘I’d like my name back,’ he said.

She frowned, perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve given it a lot of thought,’ he said, though the idea had only come to him in that moment, through a desperate need to divert her attention. ‘I want the name you gave me. That’s my name. My name is Martin. I’d like to change it by deed poll or however these things are done.’

She nodded. ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘You can still call me Christopher. Or Chris. Otherwise it’s too confusing for everyone. But officially, I’d like to be Martin.’

She paused, smiled shyly. ‘I may as well tell you while we’re at it that David and I have talked.’

‘What?’ Hot dread flared up inside him – why, he had no idea.

‘We want the spare room to be your room.’

He met her gaze, felt his brow knit. ‘I thought…’

‘I know it’s already your room, but what I mean is, I want you to keep your stuff in it in a more permanent way instead of having to clear out every time. If you want to put up posters, put clothes in the drawers, what have you… I want our home to be your home.’ She took his hand and held it in both of hers. ‘Have a think.’

‘I don’t need to,’ he said, feeling his face break into a smile, a great grin over which he had no control. ‘I would really, really like that.’

For the rest of that week, whether it was building sandcastles with the twins at Freshwater West, picnicking at Barafundle Bay, or rockpooling at Cwm-yr-Eglwys, Christopher would catch Phyllis’s eye and she would smile and he would know that she, like him, was thinking about his room in her home – his home now. His family. In these moments, he said, his happiness threatened to overwhelm him entirely until there was nothing left of him but that: happiness, pure happiness, ephemeral as tears wept into the salty pools of the sea.

---

Christopher became Martin but remained Christopher, if that makes sense. He studied hard, as was his way, and often took work home, where he would study in the kitchen while the twins watched television or played in their room. Phyllis pottered about. She had moved her day off to Friday so the two of them could spend the day together. Silently she slid cups of tea or coffee across the table to him, laid a hand on his shoulder as she passed or gently scratched his head. She didn’t speak to him while he worked, but he could feel her near, and the thought of her helped him settle, and concentrate. Sometimes he would look up from his books and watch her work and be filled with the deepest sense of calm. When David got home, the mere sound of his key in the lock broke what was a kind of trance, as if to signal that here was a peace that could not last. David would always stop on the threshold of the kitchen, an indefinable expression crossing his face: disapproval, perhaps, though not as strong as that. Doubt?

Suspicion?

One weekend towards Christmas, Christopher arrived as usual early on Friday afternoon, expecting to spend the afternoon with Phyllis. He ran the length of Langdale Road and, breathless, rapped on the door. To his surprise, it was David who answered.

‘Here he is,’ he said, and though his voice was friendliness itself, Christopher sensed that something hid there, something intangible.

Christopher smiled and threw out his hands. ‘I come empty-handed, but I can pop to the shop later and get some cans of lager or wine or whatever.’

‘Don’t be soft,’ said David, reaching out to give him his customary handshake. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

Christopher stepped into the house and took off his coat and shoes. David was waiting on the bottom step.

‘Follow me,’ he said, going ahead up the stairs.

Christopher followed him up and along the landing to his own bedroom door.

‘There you go,’ said David, throwing open the door. ‘Surprise.’

Christopher looked into his room, where a white desk stood against the far wall next to the window.

‘Got it from a mate,’ said David. ‘He had it in his garage. It’s been in our garage for two weeks. I’ve sanded it, painted it, varnished it. What do you think?’

‘Golly,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s a desk.’

‘Of course it’s a desk.’ David laughed, more than the remark deserved. ‘Can’t have you cramped up on the kitchen table, can we? Need your own proper study space at your age.’

‘I’m fine in the kitchen,’ said Christopher, realising the mistake as the words left his mouth. He turned to look at David, tried to meet his eye. ‘But yes, this is incredible. Thank you, thank you so much.’

‘Call it your Christmas present.’ David was still holding onto the door handle, his knuckles white. ‘Should keep you out of trouble anyway.’

Christopher was not sure what trouble meant. He looked back to the desk, as if to appreciate it fully. The paintwork was meticulous – not one rogue drip, not even on the drawers. There was a dark green anglepoise lamp on the right-hand corner. Was that new? His typewriter had been put there too – also by David, Christopher supposed. The air thinned. He could feel David behind him, waiting for a reaction – another, better reaction.

‘Thank you,’ he said, running his hand over the desk. ‘It’s so smooth. You must have worked so hard on it.’

‘I did.’

Christopher tried not to drift away while David rattled on about grades of sandpaper, flour paper, the superiority of satinwood varnish over gloss.

‘Gosh,’ he said, and, ‘Really?’ and .‘Heavens, that’s really something.’

He did not let himself say that he had no desire, no intention to work anywhere other than downstairs, in the kitchen, near Phyllis. Nor did he say what I believe he felt at that time: that he wished David would take the twins and leave him alone, alone with Phyllis, forever.