Rebuilding Coventry

  Out of sight, out of mind.

  KILLER HOUSEWIFE

  ‘COULD STRIKE AGAIN’ WARNING

  Today residents of the Grey Paths Council Estate were recovering from the shock-revelation that one of their neighbours, Coventry Dakin, was wanted for the murder of Gerald Fox, who was battered to death yesterday. Her husband, Derek Dakin, interviewed by our reporter, Sandra Topping, said, ‘My wife has always been a gentle, timid person. I can only think that she is mentally ill.’ Asked if he knew of an alleged love tangle between his wife and the murdered man, Mr Dakin commented, ‘I don’t know what to believe. Coventry has never shown any interest in other men before.’

  Balding, bespectacled, neatly dressed Mr Dakin, a supervisor at Hopcroft Shoes Ltd, broke down and wept. ‘She would literally not kill a fly; I had to shoo them out of the window with a rolled up newspaper.’

  The children of the blonde killer, John, 17, and Mary, 16, are staying with their grandmother, Mrs Edna Dakin, in her pensioner’s bungalow. ‘She was a dark horse,’ said Mrs Dakin. ‘Nobody ever knew what she was thinking.’

  Asked if Mrs Dakin was surprised that her daughter-in-law was wanted for murder, Mrs Dakin replied, ‘Not really.’

  The wife of the murdered man, Mrs Carole Fox, was today under deep sedation in hospital. Her children, who witnessed the horrific slaying, are being cared for by friends. Mr D. J. Broadway, headmaster of John Kennedy Primary School, where the children are pupils, said: ‘I expect they will be off school for a few days.’ Asked to comment on the murder he said: ‘Grey Paths Estate has no community centre; people have nothing to do in the evening.’

  The County Police Force have issued the following description of Coventry Dakin: ‘She is 5 ‘8” tall, of slim build, with blonde hair and brown eyes. When last seen she was wearing blue bell-bottom trousers and a grey sweatshirt printed with a tortoise design.’

  A police spokesman added: ‘One theory for the murder motive is that Coventry Dakin struck out in anger after Gerald Fox told her that their affair was over. Another is that Coventry Dakin is a member of a fanatical feminist undercover group who are pledged to eradicate men.’ When asked what evidence he had to sustain such a startling theory, the spokesman said, ‘Several informants have come forward and Dakin was known to have blackened her face in terrorist fashion before battering Gerald Fox to death.’ He warned, ‘She could strike again.’

  11 Coventry Tittie

  Around midnight on Thursday, I had a rush of optimism to the head. Perhaps he’s alive. How could a silly plastic doll kill a six-foot overweight man? I pulled a newspaper I’d never heard of out of a litter-bin, the Standard. There was no mention of me murdering a man; perhaps the London press was not interested in provincial murder, though they had reported other violent deaths: people crushed by farm machinery, trapped inside burning lorries, drowned in quarries.

  After I’d finished reading the paper I shoved it inside my sweatshirt where it served two purposes: it kept me warm, and acted as a nipple guard. I haven’t mentioned it before but, dirty and badly dressed as I was, I had been propositioned by many men as I trudged along the pavements. All of the men looked respectable and ordinary. Some had opened car doors and invited me into the passenger seat. Some of the cars had baby seats in the back. I wondered why such men should try to pick up a smelly stranger, when most of them would surely have a fragrant wife at home. But then I remembered that my figure was outlined clearly by the clothes I was wearing. I was a collection of female hormones on the move, and served to remind men of their basic biological needs and desires. Nobody ever takes a beautiful woman seriously, apart from herself.

  My good looks have always been a source of shame to my parents. When I was a child they deliberately brutalized my appearance. My blonde curls were hacked off or hidden under unflattering knitted caps. My body was clothed in an over-large school uniform during the week, complete with clumpy lace-up shoes. At the weekends I wore shrunken cardigans and floppy pleated skirts.

  I was a freak at an early age. My breasts started to grow at an alarming rate when I was twelve. One moment I was running around playing games in the school playground and, it seemed, the next I was huddled in a corner with my back stooped and my arms folded over my chest. During the hottest summer I wore a cardigan; games became an ordeal; showers were torture. I ran through the steaming room with my eyes closed. It was a tall, thin, jealous girl called Tania Draycock who first changed my nickname from ‘Coventry City’ to ‘Coventry Tittie’. By the age of fifteen my breasts were enormous; even harnessed and bound they protruded through my clothes. They affronted people. Teachers flicked their eyes away in alarm, strangers stared in fascination.

  My relations were plain people who didn’t believe in hair ribbons or coloured shoes. Their clothes were chosen for camouflage rather than adornment. So at sixteen, when I became a beatnik, the attraction was not intellectual but practical. Beatniks wore huge bosom-concealing sloppy sweaters and duffel-coats. For the first time in years I was able to relax. I stopped stooping and unfolded my arms and started to read the books that I had been carrying around under my arm as part of my uniform.

  Sometimes my looks were helpful. They got me a job as an office junior in a cardboard box factory. I had no other qualifications. ‘Take your coat off, dear,’ Mr Ridgely said. ‘It’s ‘ot in ‘ere.’ I was young and trusting. I took my coat off … folded my arms. Mr Ridgely’s brow became covered in sweat which he patted dry with a maroon handkerchief. ‘I tell you what, would you mind standing on my desk and opening that top window?’

  I had no experience of men. I stood on the desk and was surprised to find that Mr Ridgely had not moved from his chair. I leaned forward to open the window, an icy wind rushed into the room and blew papers about. Mr Ridgely was looking up my skirt. Our eyes met, the maroon handkerchief came out again.

  ‘Yes, you’ll do,’ he said. ‘Start on Monday.’

  For the next two years I continued to believe that Mr Ridgely had looked up my skirt accidentally. I also thought that he was an unusually clumsy man, constantly brushing against me and falling in my path. Once, when putting up the office Christmas decorations, he had fallen off a ladder on top of me. We lay sprawled on the lino, he still on top of me. Mr Ridgely took too long in getting to his feet.

  ‘Let’s just lie like this, together, for a while, shall we?’ he muttered into my neck. ‘I’m tired. I need a rest. My wife is very demanding; she won’t let me sleep.’

  Being very young and stupid I’d thought he meant that his wife insisted on him doing DI Y until the early hours. I imagined Mr Ridgely insulating his loft by torchlight.

  12 On the Beach

  ‘Christ, I’m starving!’ said Sidney. ‘How much longer?’

  Sidney and Ruth were sitting in an open-sided shack which was on a beach near to Albufeira. They had given their order to a distracted middle-aged woman in a print dress an hour and a half previously. They had not seen her since. A small child had served them bread, butter and sliced tomatoes. Then the child had disappeared, shrieking, into the sea.

  The cook, a manic extrovert, wore a sea captain’s hat, a skimpy bathing pouch and orange flip-flops. During this time he had done no cooking. Instead, he’d been drawing water from a well in a bucket and throwing the contents over the heads and tables of his Portuguese customers. His fancy was then to force his sodden customers to rise to their feet and box with him. After that he embraced them and shouted for a bottle before sitting down at their wet table to have a drink.

  Ruth said: ‘It must be a local custom, Sid.’

  Sidney said: ‘If he chucks a bucket of water over me I’ll drop him one. That’s our custom in the East Midlands.’

  Ruth sighed and looked at the view, which was almost as good as the brochure had promised. There it was: pale yellow sand, dramatic orange rocks, light blue sky and dark blue sea. The brochure had recommended that they try one of the beach shack restaurants; the piri-piri chicken was supposed to be ‘m
outh-wateringly good’.

  A few insects fell from the woven grass roof onto Sidney’s head. Ruth watched them scampering around in his hair, but she didn’t say anything. She was too hot and couldn’t be bothered. On the other side of the shack the cook rose to his feet, threw his head back and balanced a glass of brandy on his forehead. A toothless old woman dressed in black started to clap and soon everyone in the shack, apart from Sidney and Ruth, was on their feet, swaying and stamping on the crude boarded floor, encouraging the cook.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a show-off,’ whispered Ruth.

  Sidney mouthed: ‘He’s coming over, look away!’

  Too late. The cook was approaching their rickety table for two. Then his brown, hairy belly was brushing against Ruth’s fair, English arm.

  ‘OK, Americans?’ bellowed the cook.

  ‘No,’ shouted Sidney. ‘We’re not OK, and we’re English and we want our food.’

  ‘Ah Ingleeshe, Bobby Charlton — yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Sidney, who hated football.

  ‘President Reagan — yes?’

  ‘No,’ said Sidney, ‘Margaret Thatcher.’

  ‘Winston Churchill?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Sidney. ‘Morto.’

  ‘Princess Di … Rolls Royce?’

  ‘Yes, and while you’re here, old cock, piri-piri chicken please, for two, with potatoes and a salad and a cold bottle of vinho verde. That is, if it’s not too much trouble. I mean we’ve only been waiting nearly two bloody hours, watching you prat around, you big tub of lard.’ Sidney said all this with a charming smile. The cook took the glass from his forehead, drank the contents and gave Sidney a friendly thump on the head, which hurt Sidney and killed the insects. The cook shouted harsh instructions to the toothless crone who caught a passing chicken, and strangled it, after a short struggle.

  Within another half hour pieces of the unfortunate chicken were spitting on the barbecue and cutlery had been brought to the table. A bottle of delicately green wine dripping with condensation was put before them. The small child emerged from the sea, went into the kitchen and brought them a large, crisp salad. The crone laid down a dish of small, steaming potatoes still in their skins. Salt and pepper appeared, then curls of melting butter, and finally the chicken, succulent and crisp-edged and smelling of lemons and garlic.

  They started to eat and were at least halfway through their meal before a bucket of ice-cold water washed the food off their plates.

  13 Calcutta

  To be hungry is to feel an emptiness in the belly, but the worst thing about hunger is the feeling of panic inside the head. I am getting desperate, the idea of stealing food is no longer unthinkable. I am growing cunning … I am a fox; my eyes are narrowing and are fixed on a bunch of bananas which are just inside the door of a twenty-four-hour supermarket. The grocer, a beautiful Asian boy, is reading an Indian-language newspaper. He looks a kind boy; I don’t want to steal from him. I go into the shop and ask him for a banana.

  The fluorescent lights expose my sooty face and hands. The boy looks up; he is alarmed.

  ‘Bananas are twenty-five pence each,’ he says and adds, ‘regardless of size.’

  I select a banana, the largest of the bunch. I take it to the checkout. He rings up twenty-five pence on the till and holds his hand out. I give him two and a half pence.

  ‘I’ve got no more money, I’m very hungry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, shaking his glossy head. ‘You are the third tonight to ask.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ I plead.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I beg you.’

  ‘No. Go away.’

  I peel the skin from the banana.

  Before I can get it to my mouth he snatches it from me. I snatch it back. The banana slips and slithers between us and eventually disintegrates and falls onto discarded till rolls on the floor. He wipes his sticky hands on his short overall with small cries of disgust.

  ‘You are a dirty cow,’ he says. ‘And a thief.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I say. ‘I’ve never been so hungry before.’

  ‘Good, so now you know,’ he shouts. ‘I am from Calcutta. There everybody is hungry.’

  A white-haired Indian man comes out of the back of the shop. He wears the expression of someone at the end of his tether. The boy gathers the wasted banana together and throws it into a bin underneath the counter.

  He could have given it to me after all.

  14 Heartbreak House

  Derek Dakin sat on the marital bed and removed his trousers, socks and shoes. He had some trouble untying his shoe laces because his hands were trembling. He got up and opened the wardrobe door and hung his folded trousers carefully over a wooden coat-hanger on the right side of the hanging rail.

  Coventry’s clothes, careful and respectable, hung on the left side. Derek touched each article of Coventry’s clothing. He then buried his face in the brown sleeve of her eleven-year-old winter coat. He sniffed hard and smelt a vague smell of Tramp (the perfume he’d bought her for Christmas). Its sweetness was intermingled with the rancid smell of the cigarettes she smoked.

  He had always known that one day his wife would leave him, though he had not expected murder to be the motivating factor in her decision.

  He thought, she was so beautiful and good. Whereas he was very plain-looking (even before he lost most of his hair) and he was not good. He was riddled with faults. He harboured grudges and spent too much time with his tortoises.

  Derek took Coventry’s winter coat off the hanger and put it on. It fitted him perfectly. He looked into the full-length wardrobe mirror and watched himself as he fastened the knobbly little buttons up to the neck. Derek then squeezed his bare feet into Coventry’s brown, high-heeled court shoes. He wobbled over to the chest of drawers and found a headscarf and a pair of gloves. He put them on. While he was there he squirted himself with Tramp. He looked through Coventry’s dressing-table drawers and found a stub of pink lipstick and slashed the cloying stuff across his lips. He went back to the mirror and looked at himself through half-closed eyes. But it was no good. However hard he tried he couldn’t make Coventry appear in front of him.

  He undressed and put her things away. As he did so he thought, ‘My heart is breaking.’ He could feel that organ, so long associated with love and romance, tearing away from whatever kept it in place.

  ‘I shall die of a broken heart,’ he said in a whisper to himself.

  He put his pyjamas on over his underpants and got into bed on Coventry’s side. He clutched her pillow to him as though it were Coventry herself. He moaned, ‘Coventry, Coventry,’ into the depths of the curled duck feathers of which the pillow was composed.

  It was Derek’s habit before he went to sleep to talk Coventry through the happenings of his day. Sometimes Coventry went to sleep before he’d finished. When this happened Derek would lie at her side and look at her perfect face and congratulate himself on having this exquisite woman for his wife.

  Sometimes he would carefully draw back the sheets and blankets and Coventry’s nightdress and gaze at his wife’s naked body. In doing this he was not activated by desire. Sex had played only a walk-on part in their lives together. It had never been centre stage. No, he was content to look and experience the power of possession.

  He couldn’t live without Coventry. She protected him from the world and its many humiliations. He would probably die in his sleep tonight. His heart was breaking into pieces, had come loose from its moorings. He could feel it distinctly now, as it tugged and struggled to be free.

  He imagined John, his son, phoning around to the relations. ‘Bad news. Dad’s dead. He died in the night of a broken heart.’ Tears ran into the pillow as Derek imagined the grieving relations, his orphaned children; his body inside the coffin; his workmates wearing suits and black ties, standing at the open grave, sorry now for the torment they had put him through on the shop floor so often.

  He fantasized about the two-minute silence t
here would be at the next meeting of the Tortoise Society. Bob Bridges, the chairman, would break the stillness by saying: ‘Derek Dakin knew his tortoises.’ High praise from Bob, who knew his tortoises.

  But best of all, when she heard of his death, Coventry would come back and throw herself on his freshly earthed grave. She would blame herself and rip her hair out and rend her clothing and refuse to move, until forced to by the authorities.

  Derek was almost disappointed when he opened his eyes and found himself still alive, with the bedroom lights blazing and his face and teeth unwashed. He got out of bed and crossed the landing. A light shone under the bathroom door. He tried the door; it was locked.

  ‘Won’t be long,’ shouted John. Derek walked impatiently up and down the small landing. He straightened a few pictures of steam trains, then the bathroom door opened and John came out.

  ‘God, Dad, you look awful.’

  Derek said: ‘I’m entitled to look awful, aren’t I? Your mother’s committed a murder and run off.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Dad. It was just a bit of a shock to see you wearing lipstick.’

  Derek said: ‘It’s your mother’s lipstick. I was …’

  ‘Look, there’s no problem. Don’t feel you have to explain. It’s cool. This is nineteen eighty-eight. The lipstick is great and so is the perfume.’

  John watched a great deal of American soap opera drama and knew what to say and do. So he hugged his father and said again: ‘It’s cool,’ and shut himself in his bedroom.

  Derek went into the bathroom and removed the lipstick with a face flannel. When his lips were rubbed clean he came out of the bathroom and knocked on John’s door.

  ‘John, it’s Dad. I want to explain.’

  Mary came out of her bedroom. Her pretty face was swollen and red from a marathon crying session. ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard from Mum?’