go out and buy clothes but e only did it to please them and they would laugh because e would never go anywhere to wear them and e used to enjoy cooking and cleaning but now e do it just to avoid sitting and thinking of chopper man a living soul here among the dead who are suspended and soon will die get away they say e could not be near a man or even look at one without feeling funny in a yorkshire way they all say the weather is letting us down again and e know it sounds horrible but sometimes e would look at my own husband sitting there the weather letting him down again and again and again my living soul here among the dead who are suspended and soon will die and e must get away from here from what ripper has done to me weather letting us down again the telephone call the silence before in a yorkshire way he says e missed you once but e will get you next time weather is letting you down again missed you once but not the next test

Chapter 1

A shot -

I’m awake, sweating and afraid.

Downstairs the telephone is ringing, before the dawn, before the alarm.

The LED display says 5:00, my head still full of murder and lies, nuclear war:

The North after the bomb, machines the only survivors.

I get out of bed and go downstairs and take the call.

I come back upstairs and sit in the cold on the edge of the bed, Joan still pretending to be asleep.

On the radio Yoko Ono is saying:

‘This is not the end of an era. The 80s are still going to be a beautiful time, and John believed in it.’

After a few minutes I say: ‘I’ve got to go to Whitby.’

‘It was him then?’ she asks, face still away.

‘Yes,’ I say, thinking -

Everyone gets everything they want.

I drive alone from Alderley Edge across the Moors, alone between the articulated lorries crawling slowly along the M62, the weather stark and grey, the landscape empty but for telegraph poles.