Twelve

Jack the Ripper’s me. And I’m not trying to sensationalise. I think we’ve already had sensation enough. Nor am I implying reincarnation; I don’t believe in reincarnation – at least not bodily. I used to believe in so many things, but I don’t even believe in the Incarnation any more. No matter… You’ve shown me myself in my true light. Thank you. I’ve been fooling myself that this is a serious reconstruction when it’s little more than a crude vivisection. And I’ve been cutting up those women all over again night after night.

The irony is that I believed this walk would redeem me. I’d be back in the world, and even if I still couldn’t talk to people, at least I could tell them a story: not my own, but Jack’s. But now his story has become my autobiography. No, don’t be alarmed; I’m not a mass murderer – at least not in the accepted sense of the word. But when does the accepted sense of the word become the acceptable face of murder? For surely that’s what we’ve been witnessing tonight.

And the difference between the Ripper and myself is purely one of direction. He turned his pain and perversion outwards; whereas I’ve turned mine in. He lived his pornography, whilst I watched and you listened. He was a desperately sick man whose memory is infectious even now. And I’ve picked up his torch and his knife and, worst of all, his disease.

I’m a murderer of the mind: of it and in it. During the past year I’ve discovered an abyss inside myself that I never suspected; and unwittingly I’ve tried to implicate you. I’ve used this walk as a vehicle for my own self-disgust. I’ve exploited your prurience to express mine. And along with the Ripper’s story, I’ve appropriated his methods. Just as he revelled in his power over his victims, so I’ve relished mine over you: to tease you with terror – to set you salivating over their wounds… So now you have it. There’s no mystery to Jack the Ripper: merely a mirror. He’s me and he’s you…

What? I can’t believe that you still want more. I’d rather hand you back your money than such an easy escape clause: a smug ‘I’m all right, Jack’ – oh yes, the puns are as endless as the pain. And whatever I may have said earlier, his identity can never be conclusively established, because he has far too many. He has the perfect alibi: ubiquity, and the perfect camouflage: skin. And the case can never be closed because his crimes still continue. So what does it matter who he was a hundred years ago? What matters is who he is now.

Though perhaps the original is also important, if only to serve as a warning. We mustn’t turn our backs on history or even herstory – oh yes, words can change as radically as people – but simply on its exploitation. So if you like, I’ll tell you the theory I favour, which I can assure you is no fear-fulfilling fantasy, but the one most in keeping both with my own feelings and the known facts.

First I must tell you who he wasn’t. He was not the code-name for an intricate Masonic conspiracy, instigated by the government, to destroy the evidence of a secret marriage between Prince Albert Victor and a young Catholic shop girl, Annie Crook. That was the revelation I’d been leading up to and which was originally put forward by Joseph Sickert, at whose father Walter’s studio the pair were purported to have met. According to him, although the lovers were brutally separated, their infant daughter’s nursemaid, Marie Kelly, escaped with the child into the East End where, with a group of friends, she hatched a plot to blackmail the royal family: the results of which have been all too apparent tonight.

The hypothesis has undeniable neatness as well as the attraction that all such conspiracy theories have to armchair theorists. It ties up a lot of loose ends, but leaves a lot more entangled. Besides which it has been authoritatively refuted, not least by Sickert himself.

As an employee of the ‘Famous Feet’ Agency I was still prepared to endorse it; but I herewith resign. And standing at the scene of the crime – my crime – for the very last time, I’d like to suggest another. It too concerns Prince Albert Victor, although some people seem to find its implications even more disturbing than the thought that he was the actual murderer. But it wasn’t the prince, any more than his grandmother’s government, but rather John Kenneth Stephen, his Cambridge tutor and intimate friend.

It was Stephen, a sufficiently close contemporary for scandalmongers both then and now to confuse them, who was the patient Sir William Gull identified as ‘S’ in his private papers. He’d treated him for a blow on the head two years earlier which had accentuated the tendency to insanity to which the whole Stephen family, most notably his cousin Virginia Woolf, was so prone.

Considerable circumstantial evidence supports his candidature. Michael Harrison, the prince’s biographer, has convincingly argued from internal evidence the common authorship of the Ripper’s letters and Stephen’s poems. But even more telling are the frenzied fantasies and murderous misogyny which permeate his writings from beginning to end.

Nevertheless – and happily for the survival of the species – poetic fantasists don’t invariably turn into mass murderers. But Stephen, who’d been pushed over the brink by the prince’s estrangement, sought revenge on that group of women who were the bedrock of both Victorian society and hypocrisy and with whom, as he could hardly fail to have been aware, the prince had been cynically consorting: indulging the vice that Sir Henry Smith found so diverting in a desperate attempt to purge himself of a love that dared not even breathe its name.

But it was the prince whom Stephen loved, and the damming of his love in turn damned him. And when four years later, by then long incarcerated in a Northampton asylum, he heard of Albert Victor’s death, he refused all food and survived him by a mere twenty days.

And as I said a moment ago, I don’t offer this up as the definitive solution, but I find it at once the most psychologically true and poetically just: true, in that the killings were perpetrated by a man demented with despair at his own loneliness; and just, in that those very repressive and regressive values, to which the Queen herself has given her name, should have directly inspired the most brutal crimes of her reign.

So in the same way that we each have our own Christ and Hamlet, perhaps we should also have our own Jack the Ripper – no, Whitechapel Murderer. I refuse to use the sobriquet any more. It implies familiarity, which in my experience breeds acquiescence far sooner than contempt. But whereas Christ and Hamlet both exist as words on the page, long before we submit them to either personal faith or critical interpretation, all he left behind were some rather inconclusive messages and a very convenient mirror. Which is why he really can be all things to all people, or at least all men; and so I opt for J.K. Stephen and the grossly unflattering reflection of myself. But I can only pray that the mirror may be tarnished and the reflection distorted, and that one day I’ll be able to look both history and myself in the face again and smile.

So there you are, ladies and gentlemen: a candidate of whose existence you could never have dreamed. I’ve confessed my own complicity after a century. I’m an accessory long after the crime. I see a policeman over on that corner; as there’s no rim on his helmet he must be from the Met. I promise I’ll go quietly should you choose to press a charge…

 

I’m afraid I’m dripping on to your carpet, but don’t be alarmed: it’s Singing in the Rain rather than Noah’s Flood. I’m Gene Kelly dancing down Warwick Avenue – I’m dancing on air… How often do you go to the cinema? From now on I intend to make it at least once every week and always to something romantic. I want to sit in the dark with a roomful of people and pool our tears. I want to trust to the sanity of a collective fantasy rather than the sick fancies of a solitary mind.

Thank you… I apologise for being so late, but I quite lost track of the time: me on whom every minute has weighed as heavy as the pendulum in a grandfather clock; but not any more. I’ve resigned – I’ve thrown up my job – I’ve forced the issue. Aren’t words wonderful? Isn’t life wonderful? I can say – I can do just exactly what I mean.

I’ve always loved words. I suppose it’s because I’ve always loved the Bible. It was where I first found God. But that doesn’t blind me to their limitations. This is my body, said Luther… No, this is my body, said Zwingli: a bloody war of words over the simple word ‘is’, which in the original Aramaic doesn’t even exist. And so we for whom the Bible is a dictionary of faith must make the dictionary a bible of definition. Which is why I can never stand by and hear its meanings wilfully traduced.

But the history of words is not the history of humanity, as I realised too late when a group of Women Against Violence Against Women violated my walk. They claimed that I’d appropriated their herstory. I seized on their false etymology to reassert my control. Did they really think that history was derived from his story? Or that the entire English language was a conspiracy to demean them? Did they know no Greek?

Inevitably Vange was in the vanguard, in a grey balaclava which was irreverently reminiscent of a wimple, although I hardly think she’d have learnt her choice of expletives from the Sisters of St James the Great. I was delighted to find myself no longer in awe of her. And her scornful salutation simply steeled my resolve. She seemed to see my presence as a logical progression: as if churchmen not only oppressed women; they also endorsed their murder.

I was goaded into attack by the rest of my party who felt equally affronted, though less by the slur on their integrity than the threat of an aborted walk. In my annoyance I clean forgot that my therapy confirmed their analysis; and that, far from trying to pull intellectual rank, I ought to be making common cause. Patronisingly – which is one word they could have pulled me up on – I offered them the chance to join us: to put their grievances to the test. But it was a challenge only one of their number took up.

His name was Mark. He’s a Housing Officer from Southwark… You asked me before about faith. So much of life seems to me an act of faith: does God exist or does he simply fulfil a need; are we truly in love or just in love with the idea of being in love? And you might say your guess is as good as mine; if it weren’t for grace. Grace removes the guesswork. And it was given back to me at the time of my greatest disgrace: the grace to know God and the grace to know Mark and, most miraculous of all, the grace to make the connection.

I spoke to him briefly in the pub. I always tried to make myself available for questions; although to judge by some you might have thought I was moonlighting as a pimp. It had come as no surprise to see a man amongst the pickets. There were often one or two, though they were sometimes hard to make out in the androgyny of their anoraks and from their reluctance to muscle in on what was primarily a women’s cause… I’ve subsequently learnt that he’s a friend of Vange’s, but I refuse to let it worry me. I’m quite sure she won’t have mentioned me. I hope – I know I’m beneath her contempt.

It was because he felt less threatened that he’d decided to tag along. And he was interested to hear what else I had to say. He’d always assumed that the word history… Easy mistake, I said. No, it wasn’t, he replied; it was bloody stupid. Know your enemy… Words aren’t our enemies, I said. And he looked at me steadily. That depends who you are… And I was suddenly conscious of the insults and gibes of effeminacy that the men in the pub were directing at one of their mates, who was trying to climb the central pillar using only his elbows and thighs. And they cut me to the quick.

The rest of the walk passed off without incident, until we arrived at the multi-storey car park which was our penultimate port of call. It stank of urine, which some of the group seemed to suppose we’d laid on specially: a sort of ‘smell et lumière’. Although there was precious little light and even less illumination, at least at first. I began my blow-by-blow account of Marie Kelly’s mutilations, which drew the usual audible shudders and an even louder response from Mark.

How did I have the gall to call that history? It was sheer hypocrisy. Why bother to invent such an elaborate pretext? Wouldn’t it be simpler to organise jack-off parties in a morgue?

His presumably unintentional pun provoked an embarrassed titter; whilst a heavy man with the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles cracked his fingers and warned him not to talk like that in front of his wife. Mark stared at him, seemingly stunned that anyone could find his words in the least offensive after mine. Then he turned back to me and asked whether I was aware that the Yorkshire Ripper had freely acknowledged the inspiration he’d drawn both from the black museums he’d visited and the pornography he’d found readily available during his youth. And at least that had been confined to the top shelves of newsagents, whereas I was peddling mine openly in the street.

I had no choice but to admit the charge. I was a pornographer. The women had been right. It was I who had the limited vocabulary as well as all the other limitations that entailed. I didn’t simply use pornography; I promoted it. No, I presented it. To extend Mark’s image, I was like a video of a young man masturbating with nothing more than his disdain of the viewer to keep him hard.

But now that’s all in the past. I’ve thrown out the films and replaced the fantasies. I’ve owned up to everything, and not just in the confessional or the consulting room, but to the world at large. Although first he had to draw me out still further: What kind of man are you? he asked. I’m Jack the Ripper; I said. And the woman beside me screamed.

I apologised. I was no longer aiming to chill their blood; and I didn’t believe in reincarnation, at least not bodily…

Although I believe unreservedly in the Incarnation. At last, my sense of the transcendence of life has returned… But to return to the Ripper: I was by no means his only manifestation. The reason he’d proved so elusive was that he’d assumed so many identities – identities, not alter egos: he was a master of deceit, not disguise. And the case could never be closed because he was still claiming his victims. There was a Jack the Ripper in every man. At which point two of the couples chose to leave.

Is that it, then? our tattooed friend asked. Isn’t it enough? I replied. I couldn’t believe anyone could still want more. But he clearly believed in getting his money’s worth even if it killed him, or rather no matter who else it might have killed along the way. So I decided to take them back to the nineteenth century one final time.

And for the first time I jettisoned Donald’s conclusions which until then I’d always followed to the letter: his government-inspired cover-up which had come to seem almost as sensational as the crimes it purported to explain. Instead I told them my own preferred solution, which I would never claim to be definitive; but then nor would I want it to be. That would let us all off the hook… Earlier this afternoon I telephoned Donald to resign my position. And when Echo answered, she scarcely spoke.

I’ve a further confession: I’ve done you, or at least your prints, a gross injustice. They may not be great art; but they have an unassuming confidence, a colourful competence, which is in perfect keeping with the room, this strangely comforting room. And as long as you like them… Each to his own: that’s what I say… Oh yes, each to his very special own.

I found mine at Aldgate East Station. I was sitting alone on the platform, opposite a stark poster for War on Want, my usual feeling of loneliness at the end of a walk compounded by the events of the evening and the knowledge that it would be my last, when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. Are we going the same way? he asked. I couldn’t reply; I was amazed at the wealth of meaning he’d conveyed in such a terse phrase.

He was so relieved to have caught up with me; he’d been afraid he’d have to return another night. I was baffled. Did he realise what he was saying… how he was smiling? Oh, I think I’ve had my fill of Jack the Ripper, I replied. He was glad to hear it, and wondered who I’d find to take his place? You, I wanted to shout: you, you, you… I don’t know, I said; we run a number of other walks: Dickens, Pepys, the banks of the Royal Thames… You, you, you, I wanted to shout, but my propriety betrayed me. Come and have a drink, he said, if you can spare the time. And my courage met me halfway, and the you became yes.

We took the tube to the Red Admiral: a large Victorian pub in Blackfriars with an incongruous collection of butterflies encased on its flock-papered walls. As we squeezed around an already overcrowded table he claimed that the whole of young and trendy ‘gay London’ went there. And once I’d left my jacket and my briefcase – and my apprehensions and my inhibitions – in the cloakroom, I wondered whether that might ever include me.

But the music drowned all introspection. There was a packed dance-floor; and I was nervous that at any moment Mark might call on me. But he didn’t care for the mix. It brought back too many memories of Islington in the late seventies: in particular a band called Human League. So we sat and enjoyed the spectacle. One woman was in a wheelchair with lights that flashed on and off. And she’d made the chair an integral part of her body. She danced; she truly danced. And her fluidity put my two left feet to shame.

Are you sure you haven’t painted this room, or repositioned the lighting? Then at least you must have had it unseasonably spring-cleaned? No? I could swear there was something. Well, never mind.

I sipped my lager: another new experience. I spluttered; the foam stuck to my chin. This morning he confessed that that was the moment when he fell in love with me… I realise now why the arm of this chair is frayed… He told me to stay still. Then he moved his hand towards me. Relax, he said; what was I afraid of ? And he wiped the foam from my face with the tip of his right index finger; the tip of his left had been sliced off in a woodwork accident at school. Then he smeared the foam on his lips and pressed his finger between them. This time I couldn’t hide it. You, I said; I’m afraid of you.

Afraid of me? he said; and yet you roam the streets of Whitechapel after dark? I know what to expect there, I said; I’ve a story to tell. And it was your story: yours, not the Ripper’s, he said, that made me go as a picket and stay to pick up the guide. You didn’t pick me up, I protested. Didn’t I? he laughed, and carried straight on. I hated you when you were describing the killings; you did it far too well. But then when you broke out and spoke out so bravely I thought it was one of the most wonderfully vulnerable things I’d ever heard… I was amazed; was there a virtue in vulnerability? Had you planned it? he asked. No, I said; it was quite spontaneous. And the word tripped triumphantly off my tongue.

I smiled and sipped and spluttered again. Relax, he repeated; I’m not about to eat you – which is not to say I wouldn’t like to try. It’s the beer, I said feebly; it’s the first time I’ve drunk it. Really? he asked; where have you been all your life? That’s a long story, I said. So? he said; I’m going nowhere. It’s past eleven, I said; won’t the pub soon have to close? You’re so sweet, he said. That’s a phrase he keeps on using. Me sweet? Then he pressed his hand on mine – his knuckles had the strength and glow of ivory – and leaned over and kissed me passionately on the mouth.

His lips had a slightly beery flavour, together with a tang of cigarette smoke, which reassured me. The unadulterated taste of him would have been too much. I felt so happy that I wanted to die – no: I want to live! And I want to live forever. I feel as protective of my future as I once did of my past. And there’ll be no more pain. My legs are flesh and blood, not fire and ice and needles… and muscles, such powerful muscles. So you can add another name to the pantheon: Achilles, Hercules, Samson and me.

And Achilles doesn’t have his heel, and Hercules doesn’t have his labours, and Samson doesn’t have his haircut; and I don’t have my despair. And I laughed out loud. And he offered me a penny for my thoughts. And I laughed even louder to think that it would only be pennies between us – and proverbial ones at that, not three crisply compromising ten pound notes.

The music was too loud for us to talk and too nostalgic for him to enjoy; and so we finished our drinks and went back to his flat. He wouldn’t take no for an answer; he didn’t even phrase it as a question. And I was glad. He lives in the Elephant and Castle. I told him I’d never been there; although I’d always been attracted by the name. It’s pretty basic, he said; but then I’m a pretty basic kind of person. I was sure that wasn’t true, but I felt flattered that he’d thought it needed saying. And I was utterly disarmed by his charm.

Nothing could have prepared me for the flat. My senses reeled. It was in the middle of a row of Victorian villas which were difficult to make out as all the street-lights had been smashed. On his front door he’d pinned a mock-mediaeval sign: Eintritt Verboten, Ein Haus des Pestes. I baulked; he assured me it was just a joke. Wasn’t it provocative? I asked. He certainly hoped so. And I remembered a phrase about frightened people inoculating themselves with humour. And I followed him in; though I didn’t laugh.

We went into the bedroom. He unrolled his futon. I was afraid that I’d end up tossing and turning all night… And so I did, but not in frustration and not alone. He unbuttoned my shirt; I felt like a gift-wrapped parcel. He undressed himself; it was no mere routine, but an almost mystical ritual akin to the vesting before mass. And I felt part of a worldwide communion of lovers: no longer an emotional tourist trying to pass himself off as a guide.

He asked about my boyfriends. I told him I’d only ever had one. He refused to believe it. He said it was such a waste: a beautiful man like me… Don’t worry, I shan’t embarrass you with his compliments. Though to my amazement, I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I told him I’d never spent the night with a man before. He laughed; I was offended. He said I was too sensitive, and then nipped my ear quite sharply as if to prove his point. I yelped. He nuzzled it better; which I said made the pain worthwhile. He laughed again. He was laughing at life, he added quickly. And so was I.

I betted he’d had boyfriends though. And he ran his finger down my nose and replied that that would be telling. And he ran a finger down my spine and down my legs and then up and… I said I was glad. At that moment I wanted him to have made love to every man in the world: although within limits. The more love there’d been in him, the more there’d be for me. And the more men he’d known, the greater the commitment he’d be making when he tossed them all aside. And I nibbled the hair on his chest; it reminded me of Pan: the god of the woodland. All that loves is holy. That night I felt a god myself.

I needn’t have feared. Those films hadn’t dulled my sensibilities. I found ways of making love to him which were specific to us and didn’t conform to some blueprint in my mind. You’re so good, he told me; which touched me, as I knew I was just a novice. But he was good enough for both of us and the rest of the world besides. He slid his tongue into my mouth like an oyster. I giggled and gargled and gurgled with delight. The Bible may talk of speaking with tongues, but after years of chapped lips and dry pecks on powdered cheeks, it’s kissing with them that means most to me.

He made me feel the uniqueness of my body; and that every lump and clump and crease and crevice and fold of skin and hair was valuable – was invaluable to him. He lingered for what seemed an eternity on what’d seemed an indistinguishable inch of flesh on my side; but he distinguished it by his attention. It was special: it was him; it was me.

And I responded to him. I seemed instinctively to know the ways to please him. They were all very safe and very simple. And he didn’t ask for more as if being with me were pleasure enough. And I felt no pressure except the lightness of his skin on mine. And I realised that I’d never before been so close to anyone in either body or spirit and that, despite all my best endeavours, the two couldn’t be divorced. The body wasn’t just clothes for the spirit; it was the spirit. And I had news for all the ancients who’d endlessly debated the seat of the soul; I knew.

Was this the way to God? Was this the way to God? Was this the way to God? Surely.

I woke up first. Initially I was confused. I’d never slept in another man’s bed before. To me a bed had been as private as a coffin. It was only paupers who lay in mass graves. But now I knew what true riches were. And I refused to feel guilty. It was if a great weight had been lifted; or rather the sword of Damocles had dropped and then bounced straight off me like a child’s retractable toy.

I looked at his face: his dreamy moon-face dozing on the pillow. I committed every detail to my memory: the heavy-lidded, slightly eastern eyes with their long, thick lashes; the generous, sensuous, Merry Monarch lips; and the short, luxuriant, almost monkish hair. But above all I was transfixed by the freshly sprouted stubble on his chin which was at once the most natural and the most erotic sight I’d ever seen. And I realised to my joy that they too were one and the same.

I slid my tongue tentatively over his jaw, which felt both hard and soft and strong and gentle. And I was convinced that this was the greatest miracle: to wake up and feel life growing beside me. Not to have to go to the window and look down at the garden and commune with the flowers; but to lean over: to see Mark; to see man; to see God.

The light streamed through the curtains. I looked around the room, which was a mess. At first I thought we must have caused it ourselves during the night; and I was glad. I wanted to have disordered his room – to have disorientated his life. But then I realised it was layered almost archaeologically… He stirred. I was impatient to wake him. I pondered the protocol; but my inexperience impeded me. Then he stirred again; and I felt his fingers on my stomach. So I closed my eyes and pretended to be fast asleep.

He proved the most amazing alarm clock. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as he flicked his tongue in my ear. We made love again… Is that usual? Do you and your wife…? That is on days when you don’t have to take the children to school. Or do you have a nanny? I mean for the children… Oh I can’t begin to tell you how powerfully his tongue… I’m sorry; I know we can take that as read. When we sat up, he asked if I wanted any breakfast. I lobbed the question back. He laughed and said he thought he’d just had it. So I smiled and said that I felt quite full myself.

I wondered whether he’d want to see me again. I was afraid he might either have been drunk or indiscriminate. But now I know he felt the same this morning as he did last night, and just the same as me. We can’t meet tonight because he has some sort of Men’s Group. It sounds deadly dull; but I was determined not to show my disappointment, nor be seen to make demands. So he’s invited me to dinner tomorrow… And I’ve arranged to take my toothbrush as well as a bottle of wine.