Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. His obsession with Henry VIII, which the remainder of my family had thought was an in-joke, had flooded into reality, and the headlines for that matter. ‘Survived’ was of course my mother. The other five were not wives of his, but that is where the dissimilarities ended. Apparently my mother had been well aware of what he did in his annex, but ‘protected’ me from the truth of it, deciding she would tell me when I was old enough. The news came out shortly after my 15th birthday, and on the day it hit the presses she refused to let me go to school. ‘The children may have known, having seen it on local breakfast time news, and kids can be cruel.’ When she broke it to me – both that my father had committed suicide and been the reason three women died – I didn’t really know what to do, or think.
Please understand. There was no love lost between my father and I. If I was doing well academically then the rest didn’t matter to him. It often felt like I could’ve had cancer and as long as I did my homework he’d cope with it like water off of a duck’s back. There was no such thing as mental wellbeing. I think he thought of me as an extension of his own intelligence. If Freud were to apply his ideas of the id, ego and superego to the family dynamic, my father would most certainly have been the id. He lived an even more decadent life than my mother and I had known. It all came out in the murder-suicide aftermath. A diary was found, written in ink with a quill. My father had noted down every act of his insanity as if taking stock in a supermarket.
The first death had been of a woman named Dolly Beauchamp – almost certainly not her real name, but one the police found on a business card in her purse upon inspection. That business was, as you no doubt have predicted, the oldest job in the world. My father had hired prostitutes for a large sum of money to play out ‘the girlfriend experience’ exactly as he wanted it. He dressed them in regal Tudor-style outfits. Dolly Beauchamp had been the first to be fully involved in the scenario, and when my father had started to shout at her for cheating or forgetting to cook for him et cetera, she had played along, saying how ‘bad’ she was. The poor slut had thought it was foreplay for a rough sex act.
With this in mind, Dolly had placed herself in the jaws of a guillotine, most probably assuming there was no blade. I have since learnt that stocks are often used in bondage. She probably thought this was the same. She probably expected my father to penetrate her every hole, ‘punishing’ her for being ‘bad.’ She probably expected he’d let her out after her ‘punishment.’
She probably didn’t expect that while she shouted dirty words, spurring my father on to fuck her in the throat, he would drop the blade that had been hidden in the darkness of the ceiling and remove her head from the rest of her hollow being.
The second murder was a different kind. In keeping with the poem, victim number two, or ‘Died’ as we shall refer to her from now on, had not been murdered. I have always disagreed with this police verdict. They had categorised it as ‘manslaughter’, but the way that my father so gleefully remembered it in prose suggests otherwise. Died hadn’t been in any state to be recognised. Nobody came forward to say she was missing. She was a Jane Doe in the eyes of the police. My father never noted a name in his diary for any of his victims.
As far as I could tell, the death of Died had started as accidental. The diary stated that they had been making love on the bed, and my father had grown confused and frustrated by the emotions he was feeling towards her and started to play rough. She had enjoyed this at first, but he started to push further and further through her. ‘Twas as though I was trying to penetrate her heart’, he had written in the diary. She started to bleed from the top of her cervix. At least, I assume this is what happened. My father had very little knowledge of anatomy and just noticed blood. The sight of blood had both scared and excited him, and so he continued, with gusto. She must’ve been screaming by now, because my father wrote that he had to use the ruff she was wearing as a gag to cushion the sounds that were no doubt audible from the family side of the house. She had died from internal bleeding a few hours later. Hours after my father had finished with her. He then stashed her with Ms. Beauchamp’s body in a cupboard under the stairs of his illustrious abode. When both bodies would not easily fit, my father had had to break the bones of Died. He’d smashed her jaws with the butt of an axe, leaving no dental records. Then were the legs, which he did in two parts, making Died’s thighbones fall in two, and then the same with her calves.
Things only became interesting as I read the diary entries that my father remembered the ‘divorced’ in. The two of them, although listed as divorced in my father’s journal, had actually just been able to escape the fate he had had in store for them.
The first’s name was Phyllis. She was not a prostitute, the only one in my father’s grand scheme who hadn’t been. I’d actually met her several times. She was a middle-aged woman who worked as a maid in my father’s quarters. She had always been very shy around my mother and I, preferring to leave the moment she had cleaned up my father’s half of the house. For a woman her age she had an unusual amount of deeply set wrinkles in her face. The face of someone who was living day by day, living to survive rather than enjoy herself. In the diary my father remembered her fondly. He remembered her fondly as a nymphomaniac. Her looks had always emitted a feeling of guilt to me, and when I read this passage it clicked into place. Tears streamed down my face, I remember to this day. Whether the tears were out of sadness for my mother, or for the loss of a man who I’d never known to have any grasp of romance, let alone love, I do not know. The diary continued to speak of how my father would try to get the house as tidy as he could for when she would visit, to have more time to spend enjoying her company with red wine and warm embraces.
She had committed suicide after three years of their affair. She had written my father a letter, which he had tucked into the pages of his diary. Tearstained, the letter said: ‘My darling, I cannot apologise enough for what I will have done by the time you read this. My life has become a constant cycle of guilt over the last few months. I enjoy nothing but being with you, and when I leave your side I am reminded that our love is condemned. We exist only in the rooms of your home, and every exit is a divorce, a heartbreak, a reminder that your house is a stage upon which we act as lovers, only to leave the auditorium with a little less of our souls. I will always love you. I just no longer love the world or, more importantly, myself.’
It was a horrible feeling I took from this letter. This woman had felt about my father, who I was entirely disconnected from, how I wished I would one day make a woman feel about me.
I pushed myself to read further. I had to consciously remind myself that my father had been a murderer to stop myself relating to him. He had treated me like a process. Get through school, get a job, get married, have my grandchildren. And yet, I found myself excusing all of this because he held a glimmer of romance.
I felt that to rid myself of the innate love of my father, I would have to meet one of my father’s victims. To be precise, the second ‘divorcee.’ Her name was Holly Sloane. She was a surviving divorcee, a prostitute from the same streets as the beheaded. At 16, when I should have been pursuing higher education, I got a full-time job at a bakery, and began the search for Holly.
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