Such a Lonely Adopted Kid... I wrote to a serial killer for company.

My life began at the Crusade Rescue Hall, it was the Catholic Church’s main Orphanage and run by a small and elite group of Jesuit priests and led by the eminent sandy haired Jesuit priest – Fr. Phil Harvey.
After five years in the Crusade of Rescue Orphanage the Jesuits placed me with one of their special masonic families.
Charles Hart from Surrey and his English wife, Louise. As a reject kid of the Rescue Projects I had to return to the orphanage twice a year in what was known as ‘jelly and ice cream’ parties.
The green jelly was symbolic for electrocution and the ice cream the coolant used afterwards by the Catholic clergy.
I am just beginning to have recall of those ‘parties’ with the help of hypnosis and therapy – the circles, the cages, the clergy, Phil, enigmatic, compelling, in his garb as a Bishop banging his stick on the floor and calling out ‘bring forth the Children’ as we walked out into a circle.
I remember men – a lot of men – sail boats and more men – crawling like a kitten around their feet - watching them with other men – naked – calling us to watch them play – with each other – ‘here kitty kitty – come and get to know me.’
When I look back to my lonely childhood after my adoption all I mostly see is my adopted nanny’s floral cotton material that she made dresses with on a big black sewing machine that she told me she used to smash my adoptive mother’s head against when she was a child if she put her off her dressmaking.
My adoptive home that rescued me at age 5 from Bishop Harvey - was a small Victorian terrace in the country with dark green shutters on the windows and cool, cream-painted rooms with homemade curtains and worn wing-backed chairs covered in floral cushions. It smelt of moth balls and lime juice and Indian curry.
“Is this my home?” I twirled around, gratefully admiring it.
My new dark-haired mother, Louise, who had not uttered a word to her on the car journey home, spoke, “This is where you’ll live.’
‘It’s beautiful Mummy!’
‘You’ll answer to the name Christine and don’t call me ‘Mum, I’m not your Mother.’
She looked profoundly sad and often told me it was because she was childless. I looked up at the beautiful face with its silky alabaster skin that smelt of roses. My name had been Lucy in the orphanage, but now I had a Mother I would be any name she wanted me to be. Mother was an army brat – her father being a military officer who had spent most of his service in the British Army in India. Mother was born in India and lived there as a child. Many ornaments around the house and materials were Indian. I came to love the wooden elephants and the carved chandeliers in orange and ochre.
Mother returned to England where she married her Uncle’s son,
Charlie who was socially beneath her – uneducated and a unemployed bricklayer. Having no home they moved in with her parents and mooched off of them.
The two cousins one from military ranks and my new Father from
Vatican ranks (his sister Kathleen was a nun with Daughters of St Paul - both married.
It was this odd blood tied couple that were allowed to adopt me from the Jesuit founded - Crusade of Rescue Children’s Homes.
I was to be always a child of the Vatican – they kept a file on me all of my life and I was not allowed to see it.
My new father Charlie worked on and off as a builder, but he drank and did not provide well for my new Mother. My adoptive Mother who was allotted me when I was five years old - vented her unhappiness in life onto me with beatings and my new father took a special interest in me. I was a child so I didn’t know what his hypnotic interest in me was but his eyes followed me everywhere as if obsessed - devouring me touching my hair and my body whenever he could. Mummy made me tie my hair back screaming at me if my long white golden hair ever fell around my shoulders. In the end, in rage she put a bowl on my head and cut around it so I looked less attractive.
“Sorry M – m – m - m.’
‘You stutter!’
I swallowed hard and felt afraid of the strength of my need for my new Mother’s touch.
I did not go near her. Louise wore a short string of ice white pearls choked up to her neck. She loved tailored cotton tea dresses with cream lace gloves – she acted and spoke like a lady. Mum had genteel manners and was loved by the church and neighbours.
My new thirty-five year old father, Charlie, worked as a builder and both preferred to live with Louise’s parents because he was a drunk who could not pay the bills. Although living off of his wife’s parents his managed to save his pennies for a gold Bentley which he polished day in day out much to the amusement of the neighbours. I saw all this and my heart broke for my father who didn’t fit in anywhere and had no friends. He was ashamed of being Irish and having dirt poor roots.
“Don’t be telling anyone I’m Irish. You’ll get on better at school if you don’t,” said Dad in his put-on Prince Charles accent. “And don’t be telling anyone we got you from an orphanage either or they’ll think that you’re beneath them forever. “Bastard’s a dirty fecking bastard - making you feckin’ scum in their eyes.”
“Yes Daddy– sorry Daddy.” I was scared of him as he had once twisted my finger back so hard in temper it had throbbed for a week and mother had to put it in a bandage.
“Don’t you ever forget where you come from.”
“No, Daddy.”
“Sex out of wedlock.”
“Fornication is sex out of wedlock ...is evil.” I repeated and swallowed hard, when his breathe smelt of whisky I knew he could get cross very very quickly.
He didn’t like my resentful, bullying brother, Peter who they had also been given by the Crusades via my aunt, Sister Kathleen of The Daughters of St Paul, but he hid it carefully.
Deep down I think he would have liked his own son and his own daughter and so something sad and angry lodged inside him and he danced to its agenda and drowned it out with whisky.
Dad carefully combed back his blond, wavy hair ducking down to see himself in the tiny hallway mirror as he patted his golden waves and fussed over their position. Dad worshipped Frank Sinatra; he would croon Sinatra songs around the house, a cigarette twisted into the corner of his mouth and his dressing gown hanging open.
He leaned down.
“Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a rainy day….”
I sat at his feet and sung the rest of the Val Doonican lyrics back to him. I grinned up at him adoringly as he sang with me. I’ll never forget the words to that song and how much I loved my Father.
Yet my new Daddy was proud of his frequent face slapping and finger twisting when I got into grammar school and he called it discipline. He never beat my adoptive brother, Peter. He saved it for me because he loved me or so he told me.
My posh grammar school for girls was a good thirty miles away, two changes on red buses. Up at six, home every night at nine, then a curled, hairy fist by my face as I did my two hours of homework. We lived in a middle class area but my all girls grammar school was in an upper middle class area. Dad was terrified of being found out for being a slumdog Irish.
“Get the feck on with that homework, shite. Friends won’t get you anywhere in life, you can forget them right now.”
“I know. I’m trying to do it neatly, Dad.”
“Pass the pen here. I’ll do the math.”
“Please let me do it. Please.’
‘I can do this math as good as any cunt Englishman. Are you saying I can’t?” He pushed his fist into my face threateningly.
“You can. You can.” I pushed my math book back towards him and eventually got to bed by midnight, tired out, my book blotted by the leaky pen in his heavy hands miscalculating sums he hadn’t done for years his face red, angry and full of rage and hate.
The next morning he was up early and looking at the mirror in the hall. He clenched a cigarette between his teeth, wore a yellow silk cravat, grey cigarette pants with a strong pleat and a white cotton shirt, gold cufflinks glinting pretentiously. After dressing he would disappear for the day and never be seen until the following morning. He would enter the house looking tired and disheveled and promptly take himself off to bed followed by a trail of bourbon breath muttering expletives in his Prince Charles put on accent.
My new mother Louise spoilt my new brother Peter. He was her little Prince, but he was a dark Prince. I was afraid of Peter who was an orphan too. Once, Peter had whispered into my small seashell shaped ear.
“Why did you come to live here and upset my Mother? I’m going to fuck up your life and make each day a living misery, you little wanker.”
I mouthed the words later in front of the mirror – wanker. It seemed such a lovely word. Wanker. It must mean something complimentary and it made me think that maybe my adopted brother Peter secretly cared about me.
Peter was ignored by our grandparents who took more interest in me especially my very military Grandpa Jimmy who smoked roll ups that smelt of India, died when I was nine years old leaving no trace of himself in my memory apart from photographs where I am perched on his knee and said to be his favorite.
“Come on, Christine. Let’s go for a drive and show off all that hard work and polishing.” Daddy put on film-star shades and slicked back his blond hair with water from the kitchen tap. He brushed his teeth hard and watched himself in the fly blown mirror. He drove too fast for miles and we ended up in Maidenhead. “Are these nice, Chris?” He held up a satin lime-coloured thong in
Dickens and Jones. “They’re pretty Dad. Are they for Mummy to wear?”
“No. I’ve a little blondie girlfriend who’ll model these for me. You’ll say nothing you little bastard.’
I adored his older sister. Sister Kathleen was a nun with the Daughters of St. Paul in Rome – Pauline nuns – and she took a big interest in my life bringing me to stay over nights in the Covent in Langley.
Sister Kathleen had met the Pope in Italy and had many interesting stories to tell – even senior priests trembled in her wake – she was a diva of the Vatican with her long navy robes and thick silver crucifix I’d let my fingers play with as I sat on her lap and drank hot chocolate and ate biscotti.
I pursed my lips at my drunk father threatened to put me back into the Crusade. I thought of his cruel betrayal, to my mother by giving another woman sexy lime-green thongs. I watched his golden wavy hair and the way it curled wet with sweat at the nape of his neck, his hot blue eyes and his rippling muscles. I had matching silvery long hair and a straight nose. People always said how much I resembled my beautiful father, Charlie. Daddy was a jaw dropping handsome man who drew the lust of good-looking women in the street because he looked so much like Clint Eastwood.
I wore pristine cotton summer dresses with dirty yellowing ballet pumps; I wore them constantly, every time I played in the street or in the long back garden under the small weeping willow near the sweet William. The pumps seams split wider and the soles so worn they had two large holes in them. Every other week there would be three-day plane trips over to the green fields of Dublin to see my father’s family.
We would stay in the small slummy terraced house where my adopted father had grown up with seven brothers and sisters. They were a proud Catholic family who were close to the Vatican having a Sister who had become a senior nun at the special ‘Order of The Daughters of St Paul of Rome’
Sister Kathleen Hart had the real power in our family. I admired her grace – I loved her.
The only one of my father’s family in Dublin who would stay at home to nurse their blind mother was Frances. Frances was fifty, had white hair, a quick smile, and had never married. I liked Frances and my visits to Dublin paid for by my father’s new job for British Airways as a cleaner. I also liked the small crumbling house, which was called Ceanut Fort near the large yeast smelling Guinness factory. It was a rough slummy neighbourhood. Next door lived a poor family - the Dunnings. They had a washing-line full of grey sheets and ten Children spilling out of their tiny terrace. My brother Peter, was terrified of the Dunnings, particularly their eldest Val Dunning - a muddied kneed, blond boy, with an angelic face and an air of rebellion. I found him a fascinating creature and would stand and gaze at him whenever I got the chance, and at his penniless family, and their stinky, grey sheets billowing in the wind. They were so free – they didn’t care for the opnions of others and they had love in their hearts.
“Hello Chris, how’s your Mother?”
“Oh, good, Mrs C.” (She thinks you are the dirt on her shoe, Mrs
C.)
“And your Daddy?”
“Good too, Mrs C.” (And he would probably like to buy you limegreen knickers and watch while you do a twirl in them.) I looked on longingly at Mrs C and saw something lovely in her green eyes.
My heart swelled with need and my throat choked up for want of a family who were real and raw the way I felt inside – not closed up and dead.
My Dad’s Mother was old and blind and would sit by an unlit fire trying to keep warm. Even in baking hot August she wrapped in a woolly shawl and listened to the Angelus and mumbled prayers. She sat like a lump, never speaking or smiling noisily sipping endless cups of sugarless milky tea. Her dinners were frozen pastry wrapped around fish, or lukewarm boil-in-a-bag cod sauces and garden peas, devotedly shelled at the sink by Frances. The house had a pristine clean, Sunday-best, front parlour full of plastic flowers that no one was allowed to enter. It had a stinky, cold outside toilet with no loo roll, which over-looked a small concrete back yard. I loved the dark grey stone tenements of Dublin which smelled of sea air and the imposing Guinness factory which gave off the heavy stink of yeast and malt just before it rained. I felt at home in Aunt Frances’s’ back yard with the green wet weeds that grew higher than I did, and the nettles that stung my legs red as cooked beetroot.
On one visit, one sticky, hot summer’s day in late July, Val Dunning cornered me. I was almost breathless at the closeness of his thick gold hair which smelt of the dust from the plantation and his breath of onion crisps. I felt dizzy with want.
“D’ye want me? D’ye want to kiss me? I know you do, Chris, I can see in your eyes.’
Dunning had a straight nose and well-shaped lips and my heart beat faster as he pushed his lips against mine. I felt tight between my legs and as though I couldn’t breathe. Smelling his bubblegum I pushed my tongue back into his mouth. Part of me remembered seeing Deborah Kerr underneath Burt Lancaster, kissing hard, in the surf on the beach, in a movie. I feel like Deborah Kerr, I thought to myself in wonder and he is my Burt Lancaster.
“I want to marry you!” I spewed in delight as I thought of his stinky sheets and felt wild and free with the idea of his taking me on them. He jumped on the back of his bike and rode off across the red wreck. I turned towards the house and I could smell my aunt’s eggs frying in the tiny kitchen. A deeper sniff brought the stink of many outdoor toilets and bad plumbing. Inside the house
Frances’s delicious fried eggs were sizzling in the pan. I ate supper and went to bed early happy. It was a heat wave. It was late August and it had been a long sticky, hot summer.
“Chris, are you in bed already? I’m coming up myself now. Get ready.”
I was only eleven years old and I often curled up cozily with my Daddy in the double bed that used to belong to his parents. The front bedroom had a three-way mirror that I loved to sing in front of with a hairbrush, enjoying the three images and pretending to be a triplet singing threesome or one of the Three Degrees. My father’s warm, whiskey-smelling body in the bed was familiar. I cuddled up to it and felt safe and happy.
All of a sudden I heard his voice but this time it was a thick Irish not the British accent he put on at home. “Just touch me off. That’s it.” He grabbed my little hand and illustrated the milking motion.
There was the word again. Wanker. It is what I am, I thought carefully, hating the movement I was learning to do with my right hand to my precious father. Peter, my brother had told me I was a wanker, now Daddy was actually doing it. I must be a wanker through and through, I thought curiously.
“That’s it. Oh. Oh. Jesus. That’s good, so it is.”
He lay back satiated. “Thank you. I’ll sleep better now.” He turned over and fell straight asleep.
I lay with the moonlight streaming through the window and felt dirty. My hand felt dirty and I felt it was somehow wrong.
The grammar school girl began to fail. The part missing seemed to have all my power in it – my femininity and everything that was needed to make me a whole woman.
I felt ‘the girl’ leave me on day in a history lesson at school; the teacher turned looked deeply at me and she just floated up to the sky. The girl never came back again and I was a different person without her.
Years later I was told that split off parts are used on Monarchs for the wars in the astral.
Back then - bright warm sun shone through the dusty windows of 23, The Fort. It lit up dusty mantelpieces and grubby cream linoleum and sent sparkling white shafts of sunlight along the brown peeling wallpaper of the bedroom. I sat up and looked.
Daddy had already risen early to put a bet on the horses.
“Chris, help me wash these dirty dishes.” Unmarried Aunt Frances was busy in the kitchen washing up - white hair and thin lips, always smiling at me kindly, or slipping me bits of money.
Daddy’s mother, Theresa, was sitting by an unlit fire. I watched her in silence - trying to imagine what it was like to be blind.
She’ll be dead soon, I thought with the heartlessness of a child.
It was a lazy, late summer Sunday morning and the house was cool and quiet. Mass was on the cards for the next hour and I was dreading it. It was so hollow and boring. After the dishes were washed, I bounced a small red ball against the wall and felt bored and confined. Out of the creaky, push up windows, I could see the centre of the green, full of prickly gorse bushes and weeds surrounded by iron railings that the locals called the ‘plantation.’ Some local boys had burnt some kittens in a cardboard box. The neighbourhood had been shocked.
“Dunning did it, I’m sure of it, the sick evil fucker,” Aunt Frances had announced.
“Chris, I’m disgusted to see you attracted to evil! It’ll be because you’re one of them.’
She pursed her lips and looked me up and down with a hard ‘Chris, you’re evil because you’re Illegitimate.’
I ran mortified back up the wooden, uncarpeted stairs as fast as I could. I looked out of the window. It was still early morning, and the sun’s warmth was not yet strong enough to heat up the chilly Dublin air. Milkmen had not yet finished their clinky morning manoeuvres. Michael and some others were spinning around a girl with ginger hair. After Mass, the family went to see Uncle Gerry who was in the large Victorian Mental Home in the country. Dad pushed his blind mother in a wheelchair. The large wheelchair would not fit on the pavement so Dad pushed his mother along the busy main road. Cars honked mercilessly at the slowness. I wondered why my father was insane like his brother who was said to be a schizophrenic and had been banged up since he was a child.
Monday was a Bank Holiday. Outside in the street Children were shouting and dogs were barking. I stayed in a lot with my father watching television, as the dogs in the plantation were nasty. Val Dunning was out in the street. I could hear him. With his too-big clothes and dirty face, despite his rejection he still fascinated me. He was so very different from my own adopted brother who hated getting dirty and showed no interest in climbing trees and hurt me rather than helped me. Dunning was riding his bike too fast. He flew off the muddy hills in the late afternoon’s weak sunlight and landed with a crash on the pavement giving him a bloody knee which he dismissed with a wipe of his t-shirt.
I gawked out of the window admiringly at Val, then sat with my father, and watched the black and white afternoon matinee. I knew not to make a noise, as it would upset my father. He was watching the TV set – rapt - in a wingback armchair pulled too close to the small dusty television set.
I watched my father, looking at his clean white vest, his blonde stubble. I watched him more closely than I ever had before. He had a freshly lit cigarette in his right hand and tapped it into a nearby ashtray. He laughed now and again and seemed like an excited boy. He is contented here in this house with his blind mother near, in a way he never is in England, I thought.
I remembered last night. Memories came in flashbacks. Something large and private that I did not want to see. I looked sideways at my adopted Dad. How nice it would be if he were to just drop dead. Maybe some poison or a car accident. Dunning may want me then if he knew that he was gone. My father looked back at me. He caught my look of murderous intent. I knew that he knew what I was remembering. He turned away; half amused and resumed watching the screen. I took a long look out of the window. I could smell the sharp scent of lavender from the bush pushed up against the polished pane and watched Val as he shinned up the side of the muddy plantation. Suddenly he looked towards the window. I was mortified. He could see me. His kind brown eyes locked onto mine. For one moment I saw in them rescue and a saviour. I turned to look at my father, turned back and Val had vanished into the rough scrub of the plantation. It was six o clock and nearly teatime.
Soon nightfall would come and it would begin again – the milking.
I picked up a book I had felt the urge to pick up at the library
Strangers Among Us by Ruth Montgomery. How a person could get help by calling on ET beings who lived in another dimension for protection and guidance. How you could bow out of life and let an ET come in – to ‘walk-in’ and save you.
I wanted to escape my reality because it felt like dark cold ice and there was no love in it to give it any meaning.
I wanted to die to blot out reality and a world that I considered too harsh and horrible to ever live in happily. I wanted an ET to take over my body and me get out – I didn’t care if it was a bad or good ET I just prayed that I give my life up to them and they do what they want with me.
I prayed and prayed and balls of light entered the room and I offered my body for them to use how they wanted as long as I could get out of it.

Chapter 3.
Back to the Bishop.
I was trying to not feel an overpowering sense of loneliness as I overheard the sounds of laughter echo up from the street below my bedroom. I was thirteen years old and I was lonely and friendless. I didn’t trust people much - they seemed to have a manual for life and I had had my copy in the post. The missing part of me left a gaping hole that made me feel less than others – my father’s touching made me feel dirty and I felt inadequate. I failed my exams and my mother’s hate seemed to lessen. Peter was supposedly the clever one of the house and it was sinful of me to show off my brain power because I was a girl - or so Mother told me.
When bad reports came in from school my father broke my finger in rage, the same one he always grabbed at. My mother knew she had torn up something she was scared of.
My sexual power was gone – now my brain power. I began to feel emptied out.
Feeling shivery, and with a thumping headache, I had stayed put all morning under a warm comfortable duvet. The quietening of the street below told me that I had idled away yet another day of the ongoing heat wave that had prevailed upon London’s leafy suburbia. I felt alone in life and somehow debilitated.
A Greek studies book lay open on the floor beside the bed; my tutor had been thrilled to tell me all about Greek Myth, the mythic Persephone who had been kidnapped by powerful Hades,
God of the Underworld – she was held there and stayed with him until she was freed. I had no belief in Gods and my Mother had grabbed God as her own and told me that he hated bastards. I was beginning to hate God.
I looked up at the family’s retriever as he nuzzled his way into my bedroom, padded across the floor and jumped up onto my bed. My heart leapt and I felt an overflow of love; ‘Golden Nugget’ was my best friend, confidant and furry comfort blanket.
I leant against Golden Nugget’s soft golden fur with its scent of cheap strawberry shampoo. I wiped away the gathering sweat on my forehead as I picked up the book; the illustration was of a blonde my own age being abducted and yanked down into the void by a mighty Hades. The dramatic oil painting was called
Persephone Rising.
‘What a great story.’ I yawned to a drowsy Golden Nugget. I tossed the book across the room as Golden Nugget sleepily closed his eyes in the stuffy heat of the afternoon in a London suburb.
‘Both if us sleep through life if we can, don’t we boy!’ I told him as I fanned myself with my hand and scratched him between his furry golden ears.
Lengthening shadows threw themselves across the room and my bedroom grew cooler as I lay totally still on the bed and stared out at a bruised mackerel sky. My mood began to creep lower as I thought more profoundly about my own little life and how I would never have any love, happiness or find real friendship.
‘Why aren’t I loved by anyone bar you, Cap, darling?’ I stroked his soft, sleek body then turned over in the bed and then back again; unable to find a relaxing position on the sheet with his hot golden hulk taking up most of it. ‘I must be a real bad egg if two mothers rejected me.
Two jagged, canine ears pricked up as I shared my grief about my Mother.
‘Mummy keeps telling me how being born out of wedlock is a really bad curse. I wish I was like you – none of that ‘bastard’ nonsense in your doggy universe is there, Nugs? No one’s evil when you have four legs.’ I ruffled his yellow fur and yanked back the duvet. A surprise splinter of dazzling sunlight glinted across the window and lit up the gold in his fur and shot prisms of pink
light into the air making me feel safer.
Funny how the universe can offer great warmth, if only we remember to look out for it, I thought with buoyancy as I twisted out of bed, my bare feet enjoying the softness of my rose carpet. I cherished my bedroom, with its faded wallpaper with turquoise patterns and dark wood furniture. The room smelt of sleepy golden fur, Lentheric’s Apple perfume and lily of the valley soap on a rope. I peeked at the mirror hanging on the wall and took in my cat-like blue eyes, my wide sociable mouth, my tanned skin framed with its home-cut, mousy blonde bob. I ran my fingers through my uncombed hair and wished I had good looks so I could be adored; not a face that others didn’t notice – a mouseburger.
‘Was my real Mother pretty, d’you think, Nugs? Well, she did give me up for adoption – so I must have been a disappointment.’ I lay back on the bed and kissed the really soft warm spot just under his ear. It was the end of the relentlessly long school summer holidays. On the hottest day of the heat wave that summer I had stood on the breezy street corner, cooling off from the heat, dressed in a large sombrero, a glittery Barbie vest and Bermuda shorts. I had stood in her flip flops, watching strange men belonging to other families wend their way back to their homes. I would pick out the handsomest and watch him like a stalker, imagining this one or that one had come with chocolates for me in their suit jacket pocket; that my real Father had come to
take me away with him to love me like crazy.

I put my hair up in a red gingham Alice band and reached for one of my Mother’s dog eared paperbacks to take into the garden. Mum had a lot of trashy baloney given to her by her cheesy work chums in the local cake factory. My adopted Mother enjoyed her mind numbing job on a conveyor belt, squeezing icing sugar onto
Bakewell Tarts and gossiping all day about Cookery and Homes.
No one talked to her at home, but she chattered away about nonsense with the other housewives, passing hours and days and months and years until her face became saggy. Part of me hated my adoptive Mother because I had never been accepted by her as a daughter and I hated her cane. Part of me was needy and obsessive about Mother and the smell of her perfumery. My adopted father was too self absorbed to love either of us. My Grandpa who had loved me when I arrived was now dead of prostate cancer. My adopted brother, Peter disliked me with a relentlessness that petrified me. I could never understand why we weren’t firm friends having both being ‘got’ from the Crusade Orphanage that nestled in the lonely countryside only two years earlier than I had.

Cheap, worn books littered the bedroom floor and I chose one of them, smelling my Mother’s rose and lily of the valley
perfume on the cover. I bought it up to my nose and felt better – I told myself she loved me and only beat me to make me a better person – but I knew how stupid I sounded to myself – I just found it hard to face that my own mother hated my guts. I believed that the key to happiness was to be found inside books and I would let stories spirit me away to other places; helping me to escape the dullness of reality in someone else’s fantasy. I had already worked my way through my own library books and I was left with the desperation of stalking through my Mother’s stash of paperbacks.
I pulled a face as I studied their covers; they were creepily all about this serial killer, that serial killer – ew. My adoptive Mother was a smiley housewife, yet she clearly harboured massive resentment and rage, reading such dark matter.
I flopped back on the bed, using Golden Nugget’s warm soft body as a pillow and enjoyed the feel of his hot fur and the sun’s
warm caress on my cheek. Indoors was maybe a better idea than the shady cool garden. The day was airless and nowhere offered the respite of a refreshing breeze. I picked up the book about a notorious serial killer called Ian Brady – called the Monster of the Moors. Ian Brady.
I read the back cover. Brady’s face was childlike and yet he had killed children as well as teenagers murdered and buried them. He was a sex fiend rapist. Brady had been adopted and returned by his foster parents. He had killed a man in a very bloody way with an axe. I studied the murder of the man with the axe and felt sick come up inside my mouth. I wondered why the sick idiot did it.
Was rejection by his blood family his twisted motive? Was I
angry enough to kill?
The indignity of being thrown out by one’s natural
Mother, only to be rejected again by a fake family? I would have liked to have killed my Mother. Ian Brady’s story appeared
fantastical because his sad grey eyes seemed disconnected from the
crimes.
I felt hugely grossed out by his gory murders and yet filthily drawn to the fact that something seemed to be untrue about the reporting. He seemed like one of those ‘patsies’ – like the guy who shot JFK.
Brady was 25 years old when he was finally caught – why not live a happy life why get into killing for pleasure? Who did that? He was just a kid.
His actions were anti-Christ – a real sneer at humanity – why?

I tossed the sick book on the floor and winked at the sun and felt my spirit suddenly soar; I so loved the feel of white sweaty heat on my skin and it was going to be another scorcher of a day.
Saturday was even hotter than Friday; the weather was
silvery white and a bright Creole blue sky hung above the burning tarmac that gave up wavy lines of mist and smoke.
I flicked through my meagre, second hand wardrobe and picked out an insane purple sequin party dress to go out in the sunshine. I felt light hearted as I ran outside with my best friend lolloping after me and began to help my adoptive Father wash his second-hand golden Bentley in the lonely sun drenched street.
We worked hard in the heat scrubbing the car using wet sponges, gloopy Fairy washing up liquid and his yellow garden hose to spray the body work clean of the hot frothing lather. My Dad had invested his savings in the car and planned to use it to run a chauffeur service, but the grey peaked cap had stayed in the box and the card in the paper shop window stained and neglected.
‘Well - we did her up good and proper; she’s got a fine shine on her,’ he announced proudly in his drawling Irish accent I adored because it meant he was in a better mood than when he tried to
sound like Prince Charles on crack.
‘Yes, Dad,’ I coughed as I choked on the dust from the tyres. ‘Leave that now it’s too hot, I’ll do it,’ he offered as he reached down and wiped them clean.
I admired the car and felt pity for Daddy at the same time – the car was his best friend – his hair trigger temper and defensive stance scaring away any chance of friendship with his neighbours.
‘She’s shiny as a new pin, Dad.’ I looked up and down the street to see if any of the neighbours were admiring his limousine, but they weren’t and my heart sank. The road was so quiet that
you could hear a pin drop. He was a small man who wanted to be something yet wasn’t willing to put in the hard work to get it. I
knew for a fact that Daddy bitched about others and like all haters he was envious and negative. I felt his pain of his loneliness – the way his marriage was fake and his inability to have a relationship with a real woman and the reason he had turned to me for adult companionship and his inability to see how it made Mum hate me.
Sealawn Road was lined by sparse lime trees, expensive homes; finely decorated semi-detached houses with China ornaments in their windows. The heat had made the flowers wilt pathetically. The quiet street was wide enough to make it look like a lane and I loved to walk up and down it. I didn’t bother with the other kids much and preferred to play ball games with Nugs in the thin alleyways between the houses. I knew that this was a defence, ever since a neighbour told everyone that I came from the Crusade
Orphanage and one of their kids had called me a bastard and it made me feel left out of their parties and ball games.
I could hear someone blaring out The Undertones and when I sniffed the air it smelt pleasantly of washing up liquid. I felt carefree, even though I knew my adoptive Mother hated my guts and my bullying adopted brother was looming around the house.
‘Who cares about him,’ I told Nugs. ‘I feel brave today Nugs - there’s a good book to read and the air’s assaulting my senses.’
‘Stop talking to that damn dog, you’ll go even madder than you are already.’ Dad shouted as he lifted up the hose and woke me up by squirting icy cold water at my dress. I squealed as he hosed me down with the cold water with the same alacrity as he
had cleaned off the soapy car.
‘Dad, don’t do it, stop it,’ I cried, waving my hands about.
‘Now I need to go and dry myself.’
‘O’ don’t spoil our fun, Chris.’ His eyes followed me and my wet clothes as he dried his wet hands on a tea towel. I wish he were like a real father. Not like a boyfriend. I looked up to the corner of the street. One day my real blood father would come and take me to live in his mansion. One day he would come and he would love me and I would weep in his arms and I would come
home to all that I needed.
My adopted brother Peter and I went back to Crusade of
Rescue Orphanage in Devon or sometimes the headquarters in central London twice a year for ‘parties and games’ in their
sprawling daisy filled gardens. There was always the fear that I was to be handed back to the Catholic Clergy in their long robes, even though something about the castle like orphanage was breathtakingly beautiful and yet evil. The twice yearly parties in the hot daisy gardens made me feel as if I was eternally branded a
Crusade of Rescue outsider from normal, respectable, suburban society and other kids with real families. I don’t know what Peter though but he never spoke to me about the parties.
I inwardly winced at my memories of life in the care of the
Catholic Clergy. We were freaks.
Drying myself off, I hung my wet dress up red sequin dress over the bath room towel rail and clicked it on to heat it dry. I noticed with a frown that some of the sequins had turned grey from water and I felt a prickle of sadness about my father. The dress had been a present from their neighbour, a single woman called Jean who felt sorry for me for being unwanted.
I went to fetch a pitcher of ice water in the bright, messy kitchen. I yawned as I sauntered up the stairs leaving the jug and a beaker on my
chest of drawers and crept into my parent’s bedroom to look through my mother’s shelved books and find something to read before supper. The house had all the windows open and I loved the effect it had the fresh
breeze and the outside smells bought in. I felt as if it was a house that I would live in forever and that thought made her happy.
In my parent’s bedroom, rooting in the lined drawer of my Mother’s dresser, I found a grubby looking shell collection, a ruby brooch that
pricked my finger. I sucked the blood and dealt with the pain. I groped in the drawer again and far in the back of the drawer I found two gnarly soaps. I picked them up and curiously pressed them up to my nostrils - one smelt of flowery jasmine. The purple soap smelled charmingly of powdery little sweets called Parma Violets.
Under the pink perfumed soap bars was yet another book on the notorious, blood thirsty serial killer, Brady. Why did my Mother have so many books about this sicko? Was it because of me? Mum told me that my real father was a criminal. (She meant for having sex with an
underage child but back then I didn’t know that) I goggled at the photo
of Brady on the front cover; he really was ugly, yet he seemed somehow familiar – maybe I was meant to read about him, I wondered. I felt silly and mad for dreaming he may be my long lost blood Father; but it was
what people with normal families didn’t understand. Being adopted was like having a loose plug that you were dying to plug in
somewhere...anywhere... to feel connected. It would explain why my
school girl mother had to dump me – I was the seed of a rapist maniac. I wanted it to be true – the pain of her rejection was somehow lessened by the thought of her having no choice but to leave me to my fate all alone in the world. What Mother just dumps their kid for no reason? I didn’t want to be blood kin with such a slut and a cunt.
I picked up the book on the serial killer. This book looked even more sensationalist than the last. True crime writers seemed like skanks feeding on the suffering of others ..like ghouls dancing on the graves of their victims.
Disgusted, I lay back down on my bed. I lay propped up by my arm and read about the warped mind of a murderer, until the daylight faded and my Mother called me down for supper.
I sat in silence with the rest of her family with my book propped up against a cup and I read as I chewed potato salad. Brady had murdered six children and he had grown up with a fake family.
I wondered was I curious about Ian Brady because the serial killer was an unwanted orphan, or was it because I myself was a sinister hater
who was going to shoot people themselves? I looked around the dinner table at my adopted family eating dinner, they were bonded with each other and I had been ‘chosen’ to be left out. I hated them enough to kill them for sure.
I wondered why they didn’t like me. It hurt badly to be disliked and left out of happiness. It made me hate. I wondered was it because I was evil that I hated them.
I looked down at Golden Nugs by my feet and felt better. He loved me.

As it got darker outside I bought Golden Nugget’s paw up to my face and kissed it. As twilight fell, I used the address of the prison that was in the book to put pen to paper to get an answer on why bastards were evil.
Dear Ian Brady.
I am 13 years old. My name is Christine. It’s not my real name. I was called Lucy at the start. I don’t really have a name. I read in the book about you that you did not have a name. They call me evil but I’m not either. Are all bastards evil? Why are they all evil?
Please write back. I may be your daughter.
I carefully signed the letter in my madness, feeling guilty about his poor victims and wondering why I was drawn to do such a sick thing as write to a filthy serial killer.
I slept the fitful sleep of the sweaty, lonely and self hating.
I woke early with the ridiculous letter still hot and curled in my fist and a warm lemony sun shining gently through the streaky bedroom windows, lighting up the lonely mantelpiece and grubby patterned linoleum, sending sparkling white shafts of sunlight fingering their way along the peeling turquoise wallpaper. It was such a beautiful world; if one had a buddy to share it with.
I felt sad that such a family as this had adopted me. They were so nicey nice to others in public and yet cold to me and dull and flat – the cold grey spider who weaved a web of respectable.
I lay and examined the ceiling and thought about how true evil was actually in hiding – that my parents held the secrets to true
evil.
I longed to be the one to truly expose ‘real hidden’ evil.
I thought of the Garden of Eden and the serpentine creature wrapped around the world strangling it.
I pulled the warm duvet up around my chin.
I knew that I knew a secret, but I didn’t know what that secret
was.
I lay and watched a scabby brown moth thud against the window and buzz in frustrated zigzags. I closed my eyes and I could still hear the frantic buzzing stopping me from sleeping in the day because I was depressed. I let my body ache with isolation and need. The windows had steamed up and were running with cold condensation. I suddenly got up and went out and looked out the window. The other homes were just waking up and I knew that inside them were people who loved each other. Next doors ginger cat, Jasper whined out in the street and as I met its cool green eyes I felt afraid of an inner premonition that my whole world was just
about to cave in on itself.
I had always had a really sharp sixth sense. ESP. If I touched something I cold read it like it had a story to tell. When I told Mummy she told me that I was evil for sure and it was the occult and to keep quiet on that or I would be burnt at the stake like a witch.
What terrible things could happen to me I wondered in panic and anxiety that never left me? If I stayed indoors then I couldn’t get run over or hit by lightening, anyway it wasn’t raining. I listened hard, whilst trying to swallow down her sense of foreboding and panic. Down below in the front room I could hear the family I felt left out of watching morning TV. My adopted brother Peter was answering the questions and her parents were laughing and joking with him. My family adored morning TV. Peter seemed to hate me and relish his close relationship with our fake Mother. It was hard to believe that my brother had come from Crusade of Rescue just a few years before I had. He was adored. I wondered if that was because he was like they were; somehow insensitive and
calloused.
My family accepted life as constant TV and gossipy relationships.
My bedroom was my haven away from their trapped in view of life

• it had a large white wardrobe, a red wooden chair and a smaller pink raffia chair. On the chair was my musical jeweler box with a necklace of green glass beads and a teddy bear shaped gilt brooch.
  In the arms of the bear was perfume given to me by my friendly next door neighbour Jean, called Madame Rochas that smelt of the back garden in the summer. The book I had once leant from the library and forgotten to give back on purpose called Strangers
  Among Us by Ruth Montgomery lay open on my bedside table. It was a non-fiction book I had come across years ago all about –
  ‘walk ins’ - how if people were suicidal they could let Higher
  Beings come into them and take over their body so the occupant could die without killing the body. It seemed like a fantastic idea to just swap your body and to die or to ‘cease on the midnight without fear’ as the poet Shelley once called it.
  I lay flat on my back, with my nightdress fanning out around me, listening to The Beatles singing ‘Help’ on my CD player.
  I prayed that I could die and become a walk in and help ET.
  ‘Chris, are you up there, let’s go for one of our little drives, my
  girl, ok?’ Dad shouted up the stairs.
  ‘Just coming, Dad.’ My heart leapt as I dressed carefully, pulling on a sweater and a denim skirt. I hastily grabbed my book and lugged Nugs out by the collar and lifted him into the back seat. I sat in the front seat, buckled up as he drove too fast. I looked at the side view of his face; it was preoccupied and rigid. I felt afraid of its inhumanity. I wondered what gave him life if it wasn’t human. Suddenly I could feel it ….it was like tar – black oil - and it hated people - it had a life and consciousness of its own.

‘Where are we off to, Dad?’ I felt anxious but I didn’t know why.
‘Crusade of Rescue Kids Home. Don’t we usually go down there to give away some of your old toys. This year we’re going a little earlier.’
I did, of course, remember the Hall with its sandstone design and higher attic rooms that to my eyes made the Crusade resemble a romantic story book castle – but it wasn’t - it was a prison for kids.

‘How could I forget it, Dad?’ I replied as a lump of need for him formed in my throat. Visiting the home for Xmas and the twice yearly parties always made me needy. I gripped hard onto Nug’s collar like a safety blanket.

The Jesuit sanctuary where I had adopted from sat on a large walled country estate on the borders of Cornwall (location altered) and right next to a quaint seaside town called Milton Abbott near Tavistock.
We drove for hours through countryside, sheep and cows littered the views out of the car window. It was like a jolly trip to the seaside, but I felt afraid. Tavistock seaside was at least sixty miles away. I fell asleep in the front seat with the lull of the engine, next to my father who drove fast down the M25.
It was late afternoon when we finally arrived in Milton Abbott seaside and the sun was shining. I woke and stared out of the window as other families careered down the crowded, thin streets off to spend the day at the beach laughing and linking arms. The shops were bursting with plastic buckets and spades in a myriad of bright yellows and skimpy butterfly nets in ultramarine, teal and slutty shocking pink. I felt happy as I smelt the sharp salt off the sea at the beach front and I felt my spirits soar.
I wanted to collect shells. I would make my mother a pearl shell necklace and link it with some thread. I thought about the last time I had come here and Nugs had swum in the warm surf. The salty smell of the sea reminded me of the twice a year parties they took me back to at the Crusade. One party was in Summer the other in Winter. I would bring my toys – I didn’t have much, but I gave
my Barbies.
The day was airless and not a breeze in sight, making my face red
and sweaty in the fast moving car.
‘We’ll be there soon, Chris. Your home’s just at the end of this
small dull little village, isn’t it.’
‘Yup.’ I felt sick with fear yet I didn’t know why.
Just as if it somehow knew it was being talked about the Crusade
appeared over the arc of a hill.
I gasped as I saw it - the commanding structure was surrounded by an old yellow brick wall that stretched all around its shady grounds. Surrounding the outer wall was a thick wood with dead
chippy pines and bulbous cancerous oaks.
As we left the village and drove nearer I could see that the place was attractively lit up by two beacons that burned in holders. Its dark arched windows were like mirrors with faces that came into
view and then disappeared.

Dad nonchalantly turned off the engine and climbed out of the car.
He opened the door and I climbed out. A cool breeze blew on my hot skin and I felt dread as I took Nugs out of the back seat and
buckled up his lead.
Daddy rang the door bell and one of the Sisters lead us inside.

I felt bad I had no toys to give but maybe we were just on a visit. We stood in a hallway like refugees with the air giving us a respite
from the outdoor’s relentless heat wave.
I looked up and could see a boy though a crack in the door, he was a small figure covered in a blanket on a wooden bench. Suddenly through the same crack in the door a priest with green
eyes stood looking back.
I plucked up the courage to look at the man I knew from the yearly parties. I noted that he had a ring on the colour of blood.
‘I’m Father Harvey.’
‘Father is in charge here.’ Sister Anthony introduced – she had an
Irish lilt to her voice and buttery skin topped by pink cheeks underneath wide brown eyes. I felt as if she would be kind. She ushered us into her spacious office on the ground floor and we sat
in worn armchairs.
‘Sister Anthony! Sister Marquez usually takes care of us,’ said my father. ‘I am Kathleen’s brother.’
‘Don’t worry, Kathleen told us you were coming and I’ve been re-reading our records,’ said Father thoughtfully as he put the
files down.
‘Well, you see,’ Dad said to Sister Anthony. ‘It’s probably the wrong time to hand her back what with her schooling, but it’s got too hard and I have to put our marriage first. My wife has a problem with her. She’s like the Mother is my guess and it upsets my wife.’ He looked sheepish. ‘We took – well, we were asked by my sister, Kathleen to take this orphan with the other one and we were told that they were special - but two orphans well we’re
finding two is too much.’
I went numb from my head to my toes – this isn’t happening.
I gripped onto Nugget’s leather lead and felt my stomach fall
like lead. Too much.
Mummy had shouted at me when she saw me sucking my green glass beads – she had stared for along time as if knowing a truth that was dirty and all my fault.
Daddy looked at me. ‘Chris, you grew up here and I can’t take Mammy going on and on.’

I stared at him knowing what he said wasn’t true that I had to run from it to make it not true. I jumped up and made for the door, crying out as my head spun. I rattled the door knob. It had been
locked. I went to scream.
‘Nugs.’
I was dragged away from my dog.
My feet trailed along the corridor.
It went dark and I wondered would it all be better when I
woke up.

I woke up and realised I was laid flat in a bed with my hands tied to the single bed. I blinked and suddenly the memories returned. My feelings churned painfully and I wished I didn’t have a heart. Fear came like swiftly moving like razors to slash up my comfy past.
A nun came and untied my hands.
‘There now you were quite upset – but now I can see you
have made peace with God. ’
It was true. I was back at an orphanage. My stomach felt
full of fear.
I wondered in terror would I ever see Nugs again. They would ignore him, I knew that. Pete used to tease him. I looked around my room feeling breathless. It was a newly decorated wide bedsitting room with a single white sink in the corner. I lay still to try to calm myself and my heavily beating heart. I thought about the prison of the woods outside. I wished that I could die.
I longed for the sight of Nugs - his fur shimmering in the sunlight, his lovely body tumbling and rolling. His home was not my home any longer. I tilted my head back and my dry lips parted.
I could hear spooky high pitched children singing; it was the younger orphans; I listened to the words as they echoed through the corridors and up along all the levels of the house. The hymn was saying something about trusting in God that everything would be all right. My cold fingers curled around the fabric of the white sheet. I clamped my hand over my mouth that trembled and I felt raw. Those nuns and their mad younger counterparts.
I would soon become one of those sad lonely voices that no one cared about singing shit about God - Daddy why - but it was no good the tears came and like Alice I was drowned in my own tears.
My fingers told me that inside the book I had bought with me was the barmy letter I had written to the mad killer that was all I had to cling on to. Brady. He had been thrown out of his adoptive home
too – he was the only other person something so vile had happened
to bar me – I felt a link burn its way into my soul. I felt revolted I had written to such a sicko, yet he seemed as if he was a
connection to the girl with a family I had once been.
I promised myself that in the morning light I would slip out and post the letter in a post box. The lonely stranger in an English
prison the rapist killer – the maniac – the bad rejected shit that was locked up in a room who I figured was like me - innocent. The maddest part of my letter had run like this....
The weather is hot but deluged with rain. I was somehow
killed by them and bought back here to the orphanage – I didn’t
even know it. Do you care?