The Blooding (2 page)

Her menstrual periods hadn't begun yet, and she'd had no sexual experience. Nor had Spirit, but he was eager. After some rough preliminaries, a bit of petting and fondling--after he was just begging to do it--one spring night in Jubilee Park, near the Foxhunter Roundabout in Enderby, she decided to let him.

Of course a deflowering seldom makes the earth move, but Demon's was particularly unpleasant. What she couldn't forget was how he looked when he was inside her for the very first time. He just stared. He hardly uttered a sound. His brown eyes just stared.

It was unsettling for the girl, and if that wasn't bad enough, when it was over they sat and chatted about records, and motorbikes, and anything other than the Great Moment they'd just experienced.

She later said: "It were not mentioned! Just as though it hadn't happened!"

Spirit's appetite had been tapped by Green Demon. There was se
x w
henever he could get to her, but during it he never took off an article o
f h
is own clothing, and she was permitted nudity only from the waist down.

She started her periods later that year, and the encounters continued int
o t
he autumn when she began to worry about pregnancy. They never use
d c
ontraceptives and Demon had some thoughts about what her parent
s m
ight do if she came up pregnant and she not fourteen until December.

She started resisting Spirit's intimacies, but he'd get furious when sh
e d
id. He'd swear and call her names. Spirit was growing bigger an
d s
tronger and he'd grab her shoulders and shake her. He even slapped her across the face and they had sex while she wept, humiliated.

When his parents weren't home she went to his house for bedroom sex. Whenever she refused him, he punched her in the stomach and forced her to the floor with his hand on her throat. Even when he got his way, he called her a "slag."

Another time in his bedroom he punched her and the force bashed her head against the wall. She lay dazed and he put something foul-smelling under her nose to revive her. His younger brother often at home when they were in the bedroom, came running.

"Ye don't know your own strength!" the younger brother cried. Still, she returned to him. Demon was a very lonely girl.

Finally, first love or not, Demon began to understand that Spirit's sexual demands could get a bit dangerous, especially when problems occurred. Spirit, it seems, was suffering from "brewer's droop," as he called it. She laughed at first, but he didn't think premature ejaculation was funny. When it happened he'd rage and bang the wall with his fist, and all but weep. She'd slip away and leave him alone until the fury passed.

"Nobody likes me," Spirit would cry out. "Nobody! Especially you slags!"

Perhaps to counter the brewer's droop, Spirit started experimenting. He wanted her to "do the sixty-nine," but she thought it was immoral.

"Okay, then, let me bum you," he suggested one day, but Demon refused.

"But he just insisted on sex in me back passage," she later explained, "and finally I gave in."

The back passage sex, with her on all fours, began in the autumn of 1983 at the start of school term. There were some very cold days, especially in November, but according to his later testimony, the first time they tried it was outdoors on a railway bank. Inclement weather couldn't dampen this Spirit.

She later emphasized that anal sex became as frequent as vaginal sex, but even that wasn't enough. He liked to bite. Aggressively. She didn't fancy all those love bites on the neck and shoulders and on the inside of her thigh; it was almost as bad as being back-passaged. Finally, Spirit's sex play got too rough.

"Once when we was in his bedroom he began messing about with belts," she said. "He tied up me hands and pulled off me knickers and di
d i
t to me."

That did it for her. Demon met another boy and the contrast opene
d h
er eyes. She rang up and said it was over and she never wanted to see him again. He called her a slag.

As the girl matured, and was forced to remember her sexual experience with Spirit, she recalled that it had always been the same as the very first time. Afterward, he'd play records, or talk about motorcycles, or cars, or make other small talk.

"We'd simply carry on as if nothing ever happened. Nothing at all."

It was the strangest thing about him, she decided. It was even mor
e w
eird and disturbing than being bound helpless while he stared.

Spirit later told his own version of the brewer's droop humiliatio
n t
hat had plagued those first encounters.

"She were laughing at me when it happened," he later confided. "They always laugh at me!"

"Who?" he was asked by his interrogator.

"Them!" he answered. "Them. I call them slags, dogs, whores, bitches. All of them."

Chapter
3.

The Black Pad

One of the city dwellers who thought village life would be healthier for her two daughters was Kathleen Mann. Kath was Leicester born and raised, and when her five-year marriage ended in 1970 she brought her tots to her mother's house in the city. But Kath quickly learned that two mothers make the job twice as hard. After enough disputes over child raising, she arranged with her brother to take his subsidized flat in the village of Narborough when he moved out.

To Kath, Narborough was all that an English village should be. You could go for lovely strolls down Church Lane, past cottages with bottle-glass leaded windows, past ancient doorways framed in a time when robust country squires seldom topped five feet three inches in height. It was fun to watch tall young villagers passing in and out of cottage doors, in a semi-genuflection.

Nearly everyone had a garden. There were smells of wood smoke and carnations, and climbing roses on trellises. You might spot a treat almost anywhere, such as Victorian birdhouses with individual rooms and perches --solidly built and painted a hundred times over the years--nearly as eternal as the oaks in which they rested. And just beyond the winding village streets, sheep and cows grazed in summer pastures under oatmeal clouds.

"A typical English village," Kath called it.

She was head of her own household and her children were village children, out of the city, out of harm's way. But village life was not all teatime and violets, not by a long shot. Her subsidized home was actually just a cold-water flat with an outside toilet, and besides, there was a void. Kath Mann was a woman alone with two daughters for nine long years.

Then she met Edward Eastwood in a singles club at the Braunstone Hotel in Leicester. He was nothing whatever like her first husband, and nothing like herself. Kath was a short, buxom brunet, serious and shy. Eddie was a strapping, fair-haired talker with big expressive hands. His hair had a kind of curl, and with his horn-rimmed glasses, he might (if you fell in love with him) seem a roughhewn version of a Michael Caine Cockney. And Eddie Eastwood from Yorkshire was as glib as any east Londoner born within earshot of the Bow bells.

He was the kind of bloke with a hundred tales, all of them colorful, replete with hyperbole. An ex-soldier, he regaled his listeners with stories of barroom brawls, and even claimed to have been shot by an Arab terrorist. No one knew what to believe when it came to Eddie Eastwood--who actually had changed his surname in a court of law--which, they said, probably made Eddie Eastwood the leading fan of steely-eyed Clint in all the British Isles.

Eddie seemed a hard man, but it was mostly bluff. He'd lived his early years in the Braunstone Estates, called "Dodge City" or "The Badlands" by local police. They said he had had some rough chums in the old days, but he was an outgoing friendly sort, and passed many an hour in the pubs playing darts and drinking bitter. Eddie Eastwood was easy to like, and had a reputation as "a good pub mate."

In July, 1980, when Susan Mann was fourteen and Lynda was twelve, Eddie Eastwood moved in. He married Kath in December, and took his new family to a semi-detached home near Forest Road, by the psychiatric hospital. By The Black Pad footpath.

Things went very well for the Eastwoods. Eddie earned a fair wage and they lived in a street called The Coppice. They had a small greenhouse, and Eddie built a huge aviary from packing cases. He got so interested in raising and caring for budgerigars that he built yet another aviary, and ended up with seventy-two of the parakeets, along with dogs, cats and guinea pigs for the kids.

Eddie was working ninety hours a week at Spray-Rite Ltd., "paying double whack" to clear up old bankruptcy debts, yet in his spare time he won trophies, both with his budgies and his darts. The following year, when Eddie was thirty-nine and Kath was thirty-three, they had a bab
y g
irl and named her Rebecca. Those years were the best they would ever have together.

Of Kath's older children, Susan was the shy one. "She was a home girl," her mother said. "Much like me, I think."

Susan had dark-blond hair and eyes as quiet as a spaniel's. She liked to stay at home and play with the animals and birds. She wasn't as attractive or as bright as her younger sister, and seemed aware of it.

Lynda Mann had little trouble with adolescence. An adventurous girl, she liked everything about growing up: music, hairstyles, makeup, clothes. She got her share of A's and her headmaster at Lutterworth School was pleased with her. When she turned fifteen Lynda talked about being a multilinguist, and practiced her French, German and Italian. She wanted to try Chinese, announcing that she would one day travel the entire world. Her mother didn't doubt for a minute that Lynda would do whatever she set out to do. If money for clothes was a bit short, never mind, Lynda would babysit and earn money and make her own dresses.

There were a few boys, one in particular, but Lynda was fancy free in 1983, a fifth-former at Lutterworth. She was particularly upbeat that term, growing more fetching every day. Lynda's hair and eyes were very dark but her skin was fair. People referred to the fifteen-year-old as "happy-go-lucky" or "bubbly" or, at the very least, "enthusiastic."

The weather in November turned bitter and bleak. Monday, the 21st, was predicted to be very cold. When Lynda Mann dressed for school that day she wore tights, form-fitting blue denim jeans with zips at the ankles, a pullover, white socks and black tennis shoes. Before setting foot out the door, she snuggled inside her new donkey jacket with the stand-up collar, and, for good measure, put a warm woolen scarf in her pocket. She walked to Desford Road and traveled to Lutterworth by bus.

Lynda came home that afternoon on the school bus, but had no time for "swotting," cramming for exams. She had to babysit at 5:00 P
. M
. for a neighbor near the Copt Oak housing estate. She babysat until 6:20 P
. M
.

Supper for Lynda meant plenty of salad cream, which she dumped on practically anything. She and Eddie had a quick meal together, then she changed into a mauve sweatshirt and was off again at 6:45 for another babysitting appointment at the home of Mrs. Walker, a nearby neighbor, who was waiting outside her house when Lynda arrived.

"Sorry, dear," Mrs. Walker told her, "I'm on sick leave from work and won't be needing you today."

Lynda was disappointed, but shrugged, smiled, and said, "Well then, I'll just go home, or maybe to Enderby to see a friend. Bye!"

"Bye, dear," Mrs. Walker said.

It was 6:55 P
. M
. By the time Lynda got home a full moon had risen. A blanket of frost had settled on the ground in the Eastwoods' garden. Lynda told Kath she wouldn't be earning any money that night, then said she'd be going to visit her best friend, Karen Blackwell. Lynda had PS1.50 she'd saved from babysitting to pay toward the donkey jacket, which she'd ordered from a shop-at-home catalogue that Mrs. Blackwell had shown her.

"Are you coming straight home?" her mother asked.

"I'll probably stay at Karen's for a while, then I might just stop to see Caroline," Lynda said. "Don't worry, I'll be home by ten."

"Independent," her mother always said, when discussing Lynda. "The child is so independent."

She was the sort of girl who didn't want much parenting. Lynda seemed to know exactly where she was going in life and performed so well in so many ways it was hard to bridle this middle child. If she wanted to dye her brown hair a darker shade, well, what could you say? It was better than the henna red still showing from her previous experiment.

There was an occasional nagging worry for her mother. Lynda had had a steady boyfriend during the prior year and a couple of casual ones, and being she was so young it caused Kath a bit of concern. And Lynda had met another boy at the Lutterworth School disco, a boy Eddie called a half-caste. Yet as far as Kath knew, her daughter did not smoke or drink, and Kath believed her daughter to be a virgin. Eddie often said that Lynda was nobody's fool, and so a mother needn't worry too much.

At 7:10 P
. M
. Lynda walked down Redhill Avenue, not the most direct route to Karen Blackwell's. She was seen by a friend named Margaret, who asked where she was going.