The Blooding Read Free

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