Outside of a Dog (32 page)

But she got in. She did well. She wrote her thesis on British serial sex killers. She revelled in Cambridge life, studied hard, drank and partied a lot, had fun. The year seemed over in a flash,
and to have delayed the inevitable. No, she was not going to become a profiler – the very thought of the training as an FBI agent was a sufficient deterrent – and the question
what
to do next?
arose once again. A PhD based on more of the same? No, I was unprepared to fund it. Doctorates are for people who want – or at least are willing – to teach.

Giles Gordon, who adored Anna, came up with the answer. Why not extend her MPhil thesis into a book? It was a sexy topic, and she was a sexy girl, and the combination of the two, he recognized,
would be distinctly saleable.

‘I can’t write a book!’ said Anna. ‘I’m not that good a writer, and I don’t have enough confidence.’

Giles smiled reassuringly.

‘It’s a terrific idea,’ he said, ‘starting with the childhood of a serial killer and seeing how and why they develop. Just do them, one at a time, like a series of
essays. Don’t think: book. You’ll be fine.’

Over the next twelve months she read, did research, wrote letters to incarcerated serial killers, even consulted Hirschfeld’s
Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
to read the chapter on
Sexual Murder. (I’d skipped that one.) In a further year she had finished a long book entitled
Murder By Numbers
, a study of British serial sex killers since 1950, which was published
by André Deutsch, who had outbid Macmillan and Hodder for the rights. At exactly the same time I was selling – also through Giles – my book about Premiership football,
Staying
Up
, and when Anna and I met, instead of swapping thrillers we would exchange chapters, and make encouraging comments.

But the enterprises were not comparable. I was hanging out with footballers Gordon Strachan, Gary MacAllister and Dion Dublin, and going to matches at Highbury and Anfield, while she was in the
constant company, figuratively but harrowingly, of the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors murderers, of Fred and Rose West, Dennis Nilsen and other predators and maniacs. It was radioactive material, con
tagiously unstable and explosive, and (like Homer Simpson) she was ill-equipped to handle it safely. Every day, at her desk or away from it, with frightening assiduousness, Anna was thinking and
dreaming about sadists who raped and slaughtered vulnerable young women: of people who wanted to murder
her
, she fitted the demographic perfectly. (Interestingly, the major readership of
true crime books is women in their twenties and thirties.)

Barbara and I worried for her, fussed over her, offered cups of tea, homeopathic remedies, and counsel, but were reassured by her stoic engagement with her task. She was fascinated by the
material, and if she identified with the victims it was partly in order to give them a voice, and hence a symbolic reprieve. She was the agent who could go into the darkness and emerge, if not with
a rescued girl, at least with a story, a point of view, and a cause. As a writer she also rescued the part of herself that had always felt raw, exposed, and vulnerable: she became the Clarice
Starling both of, and to, her own darkest imaginings.

She wrote with frightening intensity, propelled by a series of forces of which fear was probably the greatest.
Writer’s
fear: of not being good enough, of getting it wrong, writing
badly, thinking slackly, opening herself to criticism. She was, after all, only twenty-two. Anxious on her behalf – my anxiety for her was psychological rather than intellectual – I
attached myself to the emerging manuscript as if my presence could help to ward off the insidious forces with which she was grappling. She was writing every day about the murders of young women
just like herself. How could she avoid being dragged into an abyss of identification with her victims, however much she was employing her inner Clarice Starling on their (and her own) behalf? She
was aware of the dangers, she maintained, but in control of them. What she wanted was help of an editorial not a psychological kind. Was her Introduction good enough? Did the prose flow? Was the
chapter on the Wests reading all right? How could she frame a Conclusion?

I edited that manuscript, blue pencil in hand like a sabre, as if I could defend Anna from the demons that it both described and threatened to unleash. They attacked me, certainly enough, and
unless I was ceaselessly vigilant my head would fill with terrible images. Surely hers would as well? I have always been anxious for her. From the moments I first held her after her birth, she has
seemed to me so delicate a gift that she would always need constant, unobtrusive and benign watching over. She developed into a remarkably loving and fiercely loyal little girl, whose attachments
to both people and objects were almost comical in their intensity. When she was four, she howled when our old sofa was sold, and attached herself to its legs so the removal men couldn’t take
it from the house. In supermarkets she would insist that we buy the dented tins, so that they wouldn’t be left alone, sad and unwanted on the shelf.

When she was little I would take her to our Victoria Park playground, and she would insist on climbing the steps of the large slide, all seventeen of them, to a height of some twenty feet. As
she reached the top, and her hands let go of the rail, she would teeter slightly, right herself, and prepare to sit down. Below her, on the paved tarmac, I would shuffle from left to right as she
swayed, arms held out, hoping to catch her, in her fuzzy brown jacket, as she lost her balance and plummeted down, to smash herself against the ground. I could envisage her little body, twisted and
broken as she landed, just on the wrong side of the slide, as I dived and failed to save her.

I’d sit in the evenings with her manuscript and her blessing, correcting, editing, redrafting, inserting phrases and questions, crossing things out, connecting one bit to another, and
I’d think, ‘She’s on the fucking slide again, and this is me diving and trying to catch her when she is in danger. It’s all I can do for her now: I can edit.’

No, I thought, as I made my notes: ‘
Show, don’t tell. Be specific: how and why “wound around her head”? Which bones were absent? Is there any need for
“Horrifyingly”? Let the facts speak for them
selves!’
I eventually crossed the comments out, and left the passage as it stands. Who wants or needs such details? Tell,
don’t show!

Lucy Partington, a twenty-one-year-old student at Exeter University, niece of Kingsley and cousin of Martin Amis, in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Anna Gekoski, making a bad decision,
accepting a lift from strangers on a rainy Gloucester night. As soon as I began to think about it, about what happened to poor Lucy Partington, my mind capsized with images, and began to founder.
Why should I have to think such thoughts: about her, or about her double, my daughter?
Why did Anna wish to?

It was a mystery, curiously analogous to the mystery with which her book ended: why is it that a very few children grow up to be serial killers, and the rest don’t? Anna is circumspect in
her answer to this question, citing Wittgenstein’s arguments against essence, denying some ‘factor X’ of the sort posited by Colin Wilson, instead sensibly laying down conditions,
neither necessary nor sufficient, which may turn a child into a murderer. But there was a clear pattern: serial killers had abusive fathers and over-protective mothers, were introverted and often
bullied at school, they withdrew into a toxic inner state as their rage transformed into sadistic fantasy.

As for why
she
should have developed such grisly interests, when most children don’t, she was similarly careful, and tentative. In an article that she published in
Vogue
after
Murder By Numbers
came out, all she would offer by way of explanation was that she had been ‘entranced’ by
The Silence of The Lambs
:

How did this happen? Most readers got over
The Silence of the Lambs
, but Anna was captivated and transformed by it. Some unexpected inner seed germinated, and there seemed little she, or
her parents, could do to control the process. If it hadn’t been Clarice Starling it would have been someone else. Or, and this was a radical and disarming thought, could it be that the
furious little girl that she had been, feeling abandoned, abused and enraged, had identified neither with the FBI heroine nor with the victims, but with the murderer himself? Could it have been
that the unconscious role model was not Clarice Starling but Hannibal Lecter?

When she’d finished writing she took to her bed for two months, utterly depleted. And when she rallied – denying all the time that she was suffering the psychic effects of her long
journey into the underworld – she shook herself off, and got back to work: began a career as a
News of the World
reporter specializing in crime (‘It’s the job my alter ego
has always wanted.’), and ghosted a book for Sara Payne, the mother of the eight-year-old girl murdered by a paedophile.

But she was restless and unfulfilled, and the incessant ugliness of the
News of the World
drained her. For a time the demands of the job had strengthened her sinews, made her more
confident, but it couldn’t last. Soon she didn’t want just to write about criminals, but to study them eyeball to eyeball. She enrolled for an MSc in forensic psychology with a view to
working as a psychologist in a prison or secure hospital. She wanted to hear the confessions of the Yorkshire Ripper, to analyse the motivations of Ian Brady, to recommend a course of action for
treating Rose West.

Thank God it didn’t work out, as following the fantasy began to lead closer and closer to the reality. She soon decided that she no longer wanted to work with rapists and killers, to spend
days confronting people who had done terrible things to others, and who probably wanted to do them to her. So instead of applying for jobs as a trainee forensic psychologist, she chose a related
but altogether gentler course of action, doing doctoral research into how victims of crime may be re-victimized by their experiences with criminal justice agencies such as the police and
courts.

It’s good work, and I suppose somebody has to do it, and teach it, which she seems to enjoy more than I – or she – would have guessed. But she confesses that she dreams of
doing something or other with shoes: ‘fabulous, high-heeled, brightly coloured, happy-making shoes’.

Shoes? Why not? ‘Sherlock Holmes became a bee-keeper didn’t he? And that detective in
The Moonstone
, Sergeant Cuff, is addicted to rose-growing. So perhaps my shoe fantasies
aren’t so odd: roses, bees, shoes – they’re all a way of seeing the nicer, brighter side of life.’

You don’t have to be Alice Miller to understand the symbolism.

19

Gerald Crich’s mother, in Lawrence’s
Women in Love
, is an odd old bird, fierce and dissatisfied as a hawk sulking in a cage, given to embarrassing behaviour,
and gnomic utterance. In an early chapter of the novel she is talking to Rupert Birkin, during a family party, surrounded by people she doesn’t recognize:

That is terribly funny and provocative: ‘What does Mr So-and-so have to do with his own name?’ Not because he is called ‘Soand-so’. The newcomer is called Señor
Fitzpoodle, or the Duke of Earl, or Dr R.A. Gekoski. Obviously something can be learned from such nomenclature, but nothing – to Mrs Crich – that is at all essential. Why have a name,
in that case? Whatever can be learned from it?

The answer, Mrs Crich, is: a lot, if you are sufficiently interested. (She isn’t.) I’ve had several in my time, and when I segue from one to the other it indicates that some major
changes have occurred in my life. Since childhood, except for a short and unremembered period in which I was apparently called Richie, I became Ricky, and within the family have stayed that way
since. In ordinary life I have always been Rick, a name that strikes me as lacking gravitas compared to Richard, which is my given name. But I have never felt like a Richard, always a Rick. Rick
Gekoski, then. (I don’t much like Gekoski either.)

But once I went to college, all of a sudden I had two names: one personal, and one academic, as if one were bifurcated by the very process of higher education. At Penn, we used the American
format: formal first name, initial, second name: my essays were all written by Richard A. Gekoski, and I rather liked the dignity that seemed to confer upon them. They were marked by Professors
William H. Marshall and Peter B. Murray. At Oxford I immediately changed my studying name to R.A. Gekoski, in deference to local usage, not having learned, yet, that when you change your language
– especially when you change your name – you change your life. A few years later this person morphed into Dr R.A. Gekoski, a name I still use when making airline reservations.