Tales of Jack the Ripper (5 page)

But even now it’s not as easy as you thought. You’ve wedged the box and can devote all your energy to shifting the lid, but it’s fighting you. Once it yields an inch or two and then snaps shut again. It’s as if it were being held shut, like the shell of a clam. A car passes on the other side of the road and you begin to give in to a sense of absurdity, to the sight of yourself struggling to jemmy open an old box. You begin to feel like a tourist’s glimpse. Another car, on your side this time, and dust sweeps into your face. You blink and weep and cough violently, for the dust seems to have been scooped into your mouth. Then the sensation of dry crawling in your mouth recedes, and only the skin beneath your tongue feels rough. You wipe your eyes and return to the box. And then you drop the bar, for the box is wide open.

And it’s empty. The interior is as dull as the exterior. There’s nothing, except on the bottom a thin glistening coat of what looks like saliva but must be marsh water. You slam the lid. You memorize the dates and walk away, rolling your tongue around the floor of your mouth, which still feels thick, and grinning wryly. Perhaps the hitch-hiker or whoever finds the box will conceive a use for it.

That night you’re walking along a long dim street towards a woman. She seems to be backing away, and you can’t see her face. Suddenly, as you rush towards her, her body opens like an anemone. You plunge deep into the wet red fronds.

The dream hoods your brain for days. Perhaps it’s the pressure of work or of worry, but you find yourself becoming obsessive. In crowds you halt, thinking of the dates on the box. You’ve consulted such books as you have access to, but they didn’t help. You stare at the asymmetrical faces of the crowd. Smoke rises from their mouths or their jaws work as they drive forward, pulled along by their set eyes. Imagine asking them to help. They wouldn’t have touched the box, they would have shuffled on by, scattering their waste paper and condoms. You shake your head to dislodge the crawling thoughts. You aren’t usually so misanthropic. You’ll have to find out what those dates mean. Obviously your brain won’t give you much peace until you do.

So you ask your friend, the one who knows something about history. And your friend says, “That’s easy. They’re the dates of Jack the Ripper,” and tells you that the five murders everyone accepts as the Ripper’s work were committed on those dates. You can’t help smiling, because you’ve just had a flash of clarity: of course you must have recognized the dates subconsciously from having read them somewhere; and the recognition was the source of your dream. Then your friend says, “Why are you interested?”

You’re about to answer, but your tongue sticks to the floor of your mouth for a moment, like the lid of the box. In that moment you think: why should your friend want to know anyway? They’ve no right to know, they aren’t entitled to a fee for the consultation. You found the box, you’ll conduct the inquiry. “I must have read the dates somewhere,” you say. “They’ve been going round in my head and I couldn’t remember why.”

On the way home you play a game with yourself. No, that bus shelter’s no good, too open. Yes, he could hide in that alley, there would be hardly any light where it bends in the middle. You stop, because the skin beneath your tongue is rough and sore, and hinders your thoughts. You explore the softness beneath your tongue with your finger, and as you do so the inflammation seems to draw into itself and spare you.

Later you ponder Jack the Ripper. You’ve read about him, but when you leaf through your knowledge you realise you’re not so well informed. How did he become the Ripper? Why did he stop? But you know that these questions are only your speculations about the box, disguised.

It’s inconvenient to go back to find the box, but you manage to clear yourself the time. When you do you think at first you’ve missed the place where you left the box. Eventually you find the bar, but the box has gone. Perhaps someone kicked it into the hedges. You search among the cramped roots and trapped crisp-bags until your mouth feels scraped dry. You could tell the local police, but then you would have to explain your interest, and they would take the credit for themselves. You don’t need the box. Tomorrow you’ll begin to research.

And so you do, though it’s not as easy as you expected. Everyone’s fascinated by the Ripper these days, and the library books are popular. You even have to buy a paperback of one of them, glancing sideways as you do so at the people browsing through the book. The sunlight glares in the cracks and pores and fleshy bags of their faces, giving them a sheen like wet wax: wax animated by simple morbid fascination. You shudder and hurry away. At least you have a reason, but these others haven’t risen above the level of the mob that gloated squirming over reports of the Ripper’s latest killing. You know how the police of the time must have felt.

You read the books. You spread them across the table, comparing accounts. You’re not to be trapped into taking the first one you read as definitive. Your friends, and perhaps your spouse or lover as well, joke and gently rebuke you about your singlemindedness. No doubt they talk about it when you’re not there. Let them. Most people seem content to relive, or elaborate, the second-hand. Not you.

You read. 31/8/1888: throat cut twice, head nearly severed, disembowelled twice. 8/9/1888: handkerchief wrapped around almost severed neck, womb missing, intestines cast over shoulder, relatively little blood in the yard where the corpse was found. 30/9/1888: two women, one with windpipe severed; the other, less than an hour later, with right eye damaged, earlobe cut off, intestines over shoulder, kidney and entrails missing. 9/11/1888: throat cut, ears and nose missing, also liver, and a mass of flesh and organs on the bedside table. There’s a photograph of her in one book. You stare at it for a moment, then you slam the book and stare at your hands.

But your hands are less real than your thoughts. You think of the Ripper, cutting and feeling his way through the corpses, taking more time and going into more detail with each murder. The last one took two hours, the books tell you. A question is beginning to insist on an answer. What was he looking for?

You aren’t sleeping well. You stare at the lights that prick your eyeballs behind your lids and theorize until you topple wakefully into sleep. Sometimes you seem almost to have found a pattern, and you gasp in crowds or with friends. They glance at you and you meet their gaze coldly. They wouldn’t be capable of your thoughts, and you certainly don’t intend to let them hinder you. But even as their dull gaze falls away you realise that you’ve lost the inspiration, if indeed it were one.

So you confine yourself to your home. You’re glad to have an excuse to do so, for recently you’ve been growing hypersensitive. When you’re outside and the sunlight intensifies it’s as though someone were pumping up an already white-hot furnace, and the night settles around you like water about a gasping fish. So you draw the curtains and read the books again.

The more you read the stranger it seems. You feel you could understand the man if a missing crucial detail were supplied. What can you make of his macabre tenderness in wrapping a handkerchief around the sliced throat of Annie Chapman, his second victim? A numbed denial of his authorship of the crime, perhaps? If there were relatively little blood in the yard then surely the blood must have soaked into the Ripper’s clothes, but in that case how could he have walked home in broad daylight? Did he cut the windpipe of Elizabeth Stride because he was interrupted before he was able to do more, or because she had seen too much for him simply to leave her and seek a victim elsewhere? An hour later, was it his frustration that led him to mutilate Catherine Eddowes more extensively and inventively than her predecessors? And why did he wait almost twice as long as hitherto before committing his final murder, that of Mary Kelly, and the most detailed? Was this the exercise of a powerful will, and did the frustration build up to an unprecedented climax? But what frustration? What was he looking for?

You turn to the photograph of Mary Kelly again, and this time you’re able to examine it dispassionately. Not that the Victorian camera was able to be particularly explicit. In fact, the picture looks like a piece of early adolescent pornography on a wall, an amateur blob for a face and a gaping darkness between the legs. You suck your tongue, whose underside feels rough and dry.

You read the Ripper’s letters. The adolescent wit of the rhymes often gives way to the childish illiteracy of some of the letters. You can understand his feelings of superiority to the victims and to the police; they were undoubtedly at least as contemptible as the people you know. But that doesn’t explain the regression of the letters, as if his mind were flinching back as far as possible from his actions. That’s probably a common trait of psychopaths, you think: an attempt to reject the part of them that commits the crimes.

Your mind is still frowning. You read through the murders again. First murder, nothing removed. Second, the womb stolen. Third, kidney and entrails stolen. A portion of kidney which had been preserved in spirits was sent to the police, with a note saying that the writer had eaten the rest. Fourth, the liver removed and the ears and nose, but the womb and a three-month-old foetus untouched. Why? To state the hunger which motivated the killings, presumably, but what hunger was that? If cannibalism, surely he would never have controlled himself sufficiently to preserve a portion of his food with which to taunt the police? If not, what worse reality was he disguising from the police, and perhaps from himself, as cannibalism?

You swallow the saliva that’s pooling under your tongue and try to grasp your theories. It’s as if the hunger spat out the kidney. Not literally, of course. But it certainly seems as if the Ripper had been trying to sate his hunger by varying the delicacies, as if it were a temperamental pet. Surely the death of Mary Kelly couldn’t have satisfied it for good, though.

Then you remember the box. If he had externalized the hunger as something other than himself, could his mind have persuaded him that the hunger was alive independent of him and might be trapped? Could he have used one of the portions of Mary Kelly as a lure? Would that have seemed a solution in the grotesque algebra of his mind? Might he have convinced himself that he had locked away his hunger in time, and having scratched the dates on the box to confirm his calculations have thrown it in the river? Perhaps the kidney had been the first attempted lure, insufficiently tempting. And then—well, he could hardly have returned to a normal life, if indeed he had left one, but he might have turned to the socially acceptable destruction of alcoholism and died unknown.

The more you consider your theory the more impressive it becomes. Perhaps you can write it up as an article and sell it somewhere. Of course you’ll need to pursue your research first. You feel happy in a detached unreal way, and you even go to your companion willingly for the first time in, now you think about it, a long while. But you feel apart from the moist dilation of flesh and the hard dagger thrust, and are glad when it’s over. There’s something at the back of your mind you need to coax forward. When you’ve dealt with that you’ll be able to concentrate on other things.

You walk towards her. The light is flickering and the walls wobble like a fairground corridor. As you approach her, her dress peels apart and her body splits open. From within the gap trails a web towards which you’re drawn. At the centre of the web hangs a piece of raw meat.

Your cry wakes you but not your companion. Her body feels like burning rubber against you, and you flinch away. After a minute you get out of bed. You can’t stand the sensation, and you want to shake off the dream. You stare from the window; the darkness is paling, and a bird sings tentatively. Suddenly you gasp. You’ll write that article now, because you’ve realised what you need. You can’t hope to describe the Ripper or even to meet a psychopath for background. But there’s one piece of first-hand research you can do that will help you to understand the Ripper. You don’t know why you didn’t read your dream that way at once.

Next day you begin searching. You read all the cards you can find in shop windows. They aren’t as numerous or as obvious as you expected. You don’t want to find yourself actually applying for a course of French lessons. You suppose there are magazines that would help you but you’re not sure where to find them. At last, as the streets become grimmer, you notice a group of young men reading cards in a shop window. They nudge each other and point to several of the cards, then they confer and hurry towards a phone box. You’re sure this time.

You choose one called Marie, because that was what Mary Kelly used to call herself. No particular reason, but the parallel seems promising. When you telephone her she sounds dubious. She asks what you want and you say “Nothing special. Just the usual.” Your voice may be disturbing her, because your tongue is sticking somehow, to the floor of your mouth, which feels swollen and obstructive. She’s silent for a moment, then she says “All right. Come up in twenty minutes,” and tells you where she is.

You hadn’t realised it would be as swift as that. Probably it’s a good thing, because if you had to wait much longer your unease might find you excuses for staying away. You emerge from the phone box and the sunlight thuds against your head. Your mouth is dry, and the flesh beneath your tongue is twitching as if an insect has lodged there. It must be the heat and the tension. You walk slowly towards your rendezvous, which is only a few streets away. You walk through a maze of alleys to keep in the shade. On either side of you empty clothes flap, children shout and barks run along a chain of dogs.

You reach your destination on time. It’s in a street of drab shops: a boarded betting shop, a window full of cardigans and wool, a Chinese take-away. The room you want is above the latter. You skid on trodden chips and shielding your face from the eyes of the queue next door, ring the bell.