They were trying to persuade me to take a shower just now. What a laugh. What a farce. What’s the point? I’ll never feel clean again. I don’t even care about them seeing me naked. My body is a separate thing. I observe it from the outside with a detachment that is almost interesting. It is thinner. My shoulder bones protrude at the top like knots, my eyes look bigger, darker – all iris and no whites. Meds, exercise in the courtyard, food. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?

They helped me into my jogging bottoms and a loose white T-shirt.

‘OK, my darling,’ Nurse said as she left. ‘You’ll get on with that book of yours now. There’ll be someone right outside.’

And here I sit. Not quite alone, because that is not allowed. Shower, meds, food. And this: as pointless as all the rest, I’m sure, this merry exercise I’ve got going for myself. But with no sharp objects to hand and a nurse outside the door, there’s nothing else to do.

---

I’m glad Christopher had Adam. It was Adam who sorted out his appearance, who took him into Leeds town centre to buy clothes – Those trousers are a bloody disgrace, man, who bought them, your mum? (She had.) Under Adam’s benign duress, Christopher bought flared jeans, an Afghan coat, T-shirts and two shirts with long collars.

‘That’s better,’ said Adam. ‘You’ll be fighting off the birds with a shitty stick in that get-up.’

Adam persuaded him to do the Otley Run with a bunch of lads from electronic engineering. Christopher vomited into the gutter outside the Three Horse Shoes, a fact that, rather than singling him out as a weakling, appeared to bestow hero status upon him for days after. With Adam, he went to see The Damned at Leeds Union, to a club called Le Phonographique in the Merrion Centre. Whenever Adam proposed a night out, he never seemed to mind Christopher’s initial reticence, seemed to understand that he needed a harder push than most but that, once cajoled, he would come along and he would be glad. Christopher worried he was a charity case, that Adam would tire of him sooner rather than later. Having no one to share these worries with, he kept them to himself.

‘I tell you what,’ Adam said one night. They were in their room at the halls, about to go down to the Union for a drink. Having dressed in one of his new shirts, a tie and his flared jeans, Christopher was sitting on his bed, waiting while Adam tried on different shirts, turning this way and that in the full-length mirror he had brought from home. ‘All’s you need is a bit of chutzpah and you’ll be flying.’

‘Chutzpah?’

Adam turned from his reflection, apparently satisfied with this, his fifth choice of shirt: a brown and beige stripe, tight around the body, the collars long, the neck open lower than Christopher would have dared. ‘I mean, look at you. You’ve got the looks, the height; you’ve got the smarts. You’ve even got the big brown peepers the chicks love, you bastard. If I had half what you had, I tell you what, there’d be no stone left unturned.’

‘You want to unturn more stones?’

Adam laughed. ‘Good point. I can’t complain, and Sophie is a peach.’

A peach, not a stone, although peaches contained stones, Christopher supposed. ‘Sophie? I thought you were with Alison?’

‘I am. She’s a peach too. But I’ve sort of got a casual thing going with Sophie. Nothing major, but that’s not the point I’m making. It’s you, my bashful, bespectacled friend. How short-sighted are you?’

‘Quite.’ What was Adam’s point?

Adam had sat down on his own bed and was pulling on his ankle boots. ‘I mean, on a scale of one to ten, where one is you can’t read the lecture notes on the board and ten is you can’t get out of bed because you can’t see the floor, how short-sighted are you?’

‘I’d say about a five,’ said Christopher. ‘I wouldn’t be able to find my way across the pub, if that’s what you mean. But I could probably get out of bed and get my feet into my slippers.’

‘Right.’ Adam frowned. ‘So the glasses we make a virtue of – don’t want you falling over a table, that’s not smooth, is it? Unless you’re going for the Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em school of charm, which you’re not.’ He narrowed his eyes, scrutinising Christopher. Christopher shifted on the mattress, coughed into his hand. ‘Your hair’s better than it was,’ Adam continued. ‘You’ve got two decent pairs of britches, a few shirts and that coat we picked up, so all we need now is… the chutzpah. A bit of bravado. What you’ve got to understand, mate, is that sometimes when women say no or stop they mean yes, carry on, and a bit of cheek is what tells you when to listen and when to take no bloody notice.’ He stood, his boots all but covered by the wide sweep of his jeans. Christopher stayed sitting on his bed, aware that Adam was about to deliver one of his talks.

Sure enough, Adam spread his hands. ‘You’ve got to look at it like this. You chat up some bird – she knocks you back. So what? You move on, no big deal. Unless there’s that tiny hesitation, in which case keep going. And basically you keep going until one of them takes the bait.’

‘The bait?’ What were they – fish?

‘That moment when they bite. But the thing is, the more you get knocked back, the less you care. So you’ve got to almost want to get knocked back, if you know what I mean. And this is the sheer beauty of it, my friend. The more you get knocked back, the less you care, and the less you care, the better you get. Do you see? And then eventually you find a woman, she likes what you’re saying, or she gives in to what you’re saying, or she just can’t be bothered to fight you off, it doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a question of keeping going till they relax. They’re uptight, most of them. They want a bit of action as much as we do; they just need to relax and see that none of it matters. Because it doesn’t! We’re all here to have a good time; it doesn’t need to be War and Peace. It’s just a drink, a laugh, a fuck if you’re lucky, and the sooner you can get them to relax and realise that, the sooner you’re on.’ He stepped closer. ‘Stand up.’

Christopher stood, found himself almost nose to nose with Adam, now two inches taller in his boots. To his surprise, Adam took both his hands in his and Christopher had to fight the urge to pull them away.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump you.’ Adam let go, took a step back and placed his hands on Christopher’s shoulders. He pushed down. ‘Get these from round your ears for a start. You’ll develop a hunch if you carry on like that.’

Christopher lowered his shoulders. His back made a low cracking sound.

‘Well that’s a hundred per cent better for a kick-off.’ Adam moved closer and grinned. ‘Now, pretend I’m a gorgeous bird. Gorgeous as you like.’

Christopher felt himself blush. Forget it, let’s just go to the pub, he wanted to say but couldn’t.

‘You want me to pretend you’re a woman?’ he asked instead. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Deadly. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to make a pass, not that way inclined; just want to get you to feel the force, like Luke Skywalker. You need to get some use out of your lightsaber, Lukey baby.’ He was mucking about, pretending to be solemn, had put his hands together in prayer. ‘Pretend. Use the Force.’

Christopher opened his mouth to protest. Adam grabbed his hands and placed them on his own waist.

‘Adam, I…’ The heat in his face spread down his neck. He looked at the floor – the orange scratchy carpet that Adam said was made from Brillo pads.

‘Trust me, flower. I’m Obi Wan. You’re Luke Skywalker. Now. Pull me towards you.’

‘I can’t.’ Horrified, Christopher stared at the tips of Adam’s silly boots, his own brown brogues polished to a high shine. This was utterly ridiculous. ‘We… in my family… we don’t really…’

‘We don’t in mine either. Just relax, will you? Look, your shoulders are right back up again; what are they on, string? You’re not a puppet. Get ’em down.’

Christopher obeyed, rolled his head to loosen his neck, but still could not look at his room-mate.

‘Now, pretend I’m a bird and pull me towards you. Stop groaning, Christopher. It’s called a hug. Women love it. It’s tender without being predatory – before you get predatory, although we don’t say that and that bit I’ll be leaving to you, mate. Go on, pull me in.’

‘I…’

‘Do it.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Do. It.’

Christopher sighed. Impatient, it was Adam who pulled Christopher towards him until their bodies almost touched. There was no room to keep his head at a downward angle, so he found himself obliged to tilt it back a little and direct his gaze over Adam’s left shoulder.

‘That’s it,’ said Adam. ‘Steady as you like.’ Without warning, he wrapped his arms around Christopher’s shoulders and pulled him into an embrace. Now their bodies touched, all right. Christopher could feel the strength in Adam’s arms, his hard, thin torso against his own. His neck had almost locked itself over Adam’s collarbone, the tip of his chin against Adam’s back. It was all so different from the way it had been with Angie, or slow-dancing at the youth club with the girl with greasy hair. He kept his eyes on Adam’s T. Rex poster on the far wall

‘You see, mate,’ said Adam. ‘It’s not that bad. But you are as tense as a tightrope. Try and relax, will you, for crying out loud. At least try. I’m not here to jump you – this is what this position says. I’m your friend, it says, you can trust me, all that.’

Adam leant to the right, then the left, keeping tight hold of Christopher all the while. He repeated this once, twice more. Every muscle in Christopher’s body clenched, but he concentrated on keeping his shoulders down, as if relaxed, in the hope that Adam would stop.

‘Hug me back,’ Adam said.

Christopher lifted his arms a little and closed them tighter around his friend. Their chests connected; he could feel the side of Adam’s head against his own, could smell the Brut cologne he kept on his bedside table.

‘That’s it. Now. I’m a girl. I’m a girl and I’m thinking,’ Adam switched to a high-pitched parody of a woman’s voice, ‘here’s a strong fellow who can hold me tight. He’ll look after me, he’ll protect me from that nasty Ripper man.’

Christopher closed his eyes, but it was useless – he felt his knees lock.

‘This guy is strong and I can trust him,’ Adam continued, still in the silly girlish voice. ‘This guy will look after me – he will protect me against perverts and nasty men in raincoats, and murderers. I think… I think I’ll let him feel my tits.’ He jumped back and laughed.

Christopher shook his head, unable to stop himself from smiling. ‘You’re a lunatic, Adam,’ he said. ‘An absolute lunatic.’

Adam clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come on, you stiff bastard, let’s go and get pissed.’

In moments like this, Christopher said, he wondered whether it was Adam he liked so enormously, or Adam’s view of him. In Adam’s eyes, he, Christopher, was no more than shy, perhaps a little square but still, essentially, one of the boys. In Adam’s view, he, Christopher, was normal.

---

Despite Adam’s mischievous influence, Christopher studied hard. He still found refuge in solitude, books, his Top-40 tapes. ‘Denis’, ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’. He found St Urban’s in Headingley, resumed his weekly visits to church. He prayed for patience, lit candles for his mother, whoever and wherever she was.

Oh Lord, protect and care for my real mother, whose son was taken from her. Keep her in your light and let her know that I’m looking for her. Tell her I will find her, if not in words then in a feeling of peace. Amen.

The Sex Pistols went to number one, the students protested outside the Parkinson Building to show their support for the firefighters. He called Samantha Jackson, who asked him to call her weekly, for a chat, which he did. She was easy to talk to, easier over the phone. When he expressed frustration, she counselled him against rushing, against taking matters into his own hands. And still no word came from the Registrar.

December. A Christmas tree went up in the Union building, another outside the Queens Hotel in City Square. Another strike by the Ripper: Marilyn Moore, who survived. Christopher bought The Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mail and cut out the articles relating to the attack. He bought a scrapbook and glued the cuttings in there, along with photocopies from newspapers he had found at Leeds City Library down in Calverley Street, covering the Ripper’s victims to date: Emily Jackson, Marcella Claxton, Irene Richardson, Tina Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Maureen Long and Jean Jordan, the woman Alison – or Angie, was it? – had mentioned in the pub.

Now that this last victim had survived, a nation pinned its hopes on her description of the man they were calling a monster, a coward, a psychopath. But her account, plus some matching tyre tracks amounted to nothing much. Not enough, certainly, to stem the fear that had infiltrated the mind of every female student on campus. At the Union, a minibus was organised to take women to their places of residence. Those who refused to be prisoners in their rooms collected in parties to walk to and from the pub. Stories abounded of women reporting their husbands, their brothers. Do you know this man?

Christopher fell into the habit of cutting out any newspaper clipping he saw – Mob Jeer Lorry Driver; Why Can’t They Catch Him?; Prostitutes Go in Fear – and into his cheap scrapbook he stuck them all. Sometimes, when he’d finished his reading, he would flick through the scrapbook, poring over the headlines and the words, the photographs and the photofits, imagining what dark details lay invisibly there where the grey newsprint smudged the thin white page. What secrets, what horrors.

Towards the end of term, he was walking back to Devonshire Hall when he was filled with that familiar feeling of knowledge. And sure enough, there in the pigeonhole marked H was a letter addressed to him. At the sight of it, his insides flamed, because he knew in that moment, he said, that the rag end of an old year was about to be brought to life with the promise of something new.

The envelope was large – three times the size of the standard rectangular official letter. There was another envelope too, white, squarer, upon which he recognised Margaret’s handwriting. He took both letters up to his room, placed Margaret’s letter to one side of his desk and held the brown envelope to his chest. On the bookshelf, Adam had rigged up a plastic Christmas tree, no bigger than a Tiny Tears doll. He had bought it from Leeds market for thirty pence. A lone strand of ratty silver tinsel snaked around its body like a helter-skelter, and disappeared down the back of the shelving. Christopher opened the large envelope and pulled out the pinkish document.

‘Liverpool’ was handwritten, in fountain pen. Below, columns – all filled with the same handwriting.

I often think of him holding this handwritten document in his hands, of how he described that moment to me. His arm dropped to his side, he said, as if deadened by a hard thump. He had to steady his breathing, hand against his mouth. He could smell the ink in the sweat of his palms.

‘Martin,’ he whispered. ‘I am Martin.’

A memory surfaced, until now suppressed. A woman he used to see sometimes on Hestham Avenue when he was a boy. She wore a headscarf made of blue patterned silk or satin, tied under her chin, but that was all he could recall except that he did not recognise her as one of his neighbours. But now, seeing his name on the birth certificate, he remembered this woman, how she had talked to him once and made him afraid. He had been no more than ten or eleven and out on his bike – a second-hand Raleigh Chopper, the best thing he had ever owned. He had been cycling up and down the road, hungry and a little bored, trying to do wheelies like the other boys, when the chain had come off. He’d turned the bike upside down and rested it on its handlebars while he teased the oily links back onto the cog’s teeth. Someone had grabbed his arm, and when he turned, he saw it was the woman – he recognised her scarf.

She had called him a name, her grey eyes searching his.

‘No, sorry,’ he had replied, politely as he had been told. ‘I’m Christopher.’

‘Christopher? Are you sure? You’re not…’

Oh, what had she called him?

She had been younger than her coat and headscarf suggested, that much he could remember – no older than his schoolteacher, Miss Briggs, who was getting married. But she had a wild look to her. Nothing he could have explained – she wasn’t raging insane like the madwoman from the town centre who kept dogs and sang in the street, but there was something in her face, in the way she insisted on pushing a name onto him like the gypsies on the pier pushed their lucky heather, a name he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. I must look like someone she knows, he had thought at the time, but now, staring at his birth certificate, he realised with a burning feeling in his abdomen that she might not have been mistaken. Perhaps she did know him after all? Was it possible? No, no of course not. But he had seen this woman more than once, always on the street, never going into anyone’s house or talking to anyone or moving with any sense of purpose. She had been there the day he left for university, he remembered. He had seen her at the corner when his parents pulled out onto the main road. As they passed, she had turned her face away. He had seen only the sky blue of her headscarf.

After a moment, he brought the certificate to his eyes once more.

He tossed the certificate onto his desk and dashed out of the room to the lavatories, where he relieved himself with a sigh. The hot stream coursed from him, splashing into the porcelain with the force of an open tap.

‘Martin,’ he said to his reflection in the rust-corroded mirror. ‘Martin Anthony Curtiss.’

Martin. House martin. Martin Luther King. St Martin of Tours, who gave his cloak to the beggar at the gates. Was he, Christopher, kind enough to do something like that? Could he be a Martin? He studied his eyes, his broad nose, his chin, which struck him now as almost square. A square jaw, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? Martins had square jaws in a way that perhaps Christophers did not. Adam always teased him about his height – you lanky bastard, fucking leggy bugger – had once shaken his head and told him his appearance was wasted on him. Angie had kissed him, she had…

He hoped never to see her again. If he did, he would pretend he hadn’t.

Back in his room, he pored over the birth certificate until he could see it even when he closed his eyes. His mother was from Cheshire. He could go to the address listed on this document – he could go now. His mother, Phyllis Curtiss, wouldn’t live there any more, of course, but perhaps her parents did. His grandparents! The thought hit him in the solar plexus. His mother was probably young; that would mean his grandparents would not be too old – early sixties, maybe, or younger if they too had had children early. Children! He might have an auntie or an uncle. They might all get together at Christmas – sing carols around the piano like the pictures on the front of Christmas cards. He wondered whether they drank alcohol, like Adam and the other students, or were sober like Jack and Margaret – whether they went to Mass together on Christmas Eve, or not at all. He wondered if his birth father was still around – Mikael, a sailor; it was unlikely. He sounded foreign – Polish, perhaps, or Russian. The thought mattered less than the rest.

But, he said, Samantha Jackson had told him to wait, to proceed through the proper channels. He would make another appointment with her – that was the correct course of action.

The light fell. His window greyed, blackened. In his mind’s eye, his family posed before him: a faceless group shot of his ancestry, imagined smiles in a darkroom developing tray. Uncoiled, the rope cast itself towards them. He would tie himself there and, finally, moor.