The Whitfield Strangler

This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autoficitonal seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

There’s a painful lull in conversation, so I say, ‘My cousin is the Whitfield Strangler.’

The room, bright and airy just a minute ago, darkens suddenly, as if a curtain has been drawn. I’m sat at an old wooden beer barrel with Wilf and Peter, drinking IPA. Peter, still reeling from a weekend on mushrooms, is slouched in his woolly hat, his powder-blue eyes the only colour left in him. They’re brewing something upstairs and the pub smells of burnt hops.

‘I suppose he’s my second cousin really,’ I admit, ‘or something like that. He’s my mum’s cousin’s son.’ It’s my fifth pint but I can get away with two more at least, before I have to go home for dinner.

Wilf leans forward. Wilf is a tiny little man, his hair combed in a side parting that almost conceals the early stages of male pattern baldness. ‘I saw the Netflix thing about the Whitfield Strangler. Did you see it?’

‘I didn’t,’ I say.

‘Did you see it, Pete?’ Wilf says.

‘No.’ Peter stares off across the pub, rests the back of his head against the window that looks out onto the busy Highstreet. It must be the start of the school run. It’s hard to gauge time in here. There’s a circular white clock above the bar, but it’s been stuck at 11:45 for as long as I can remember.

‘When he was little,’ Wilf says, ‘he’d torture animals and shit.’

‘Ants,’ I say. Even though he was only distantly related, the story of the Whitfield Strangler has become a part of my family folklore. When they caught him, in 1994, I was sitting my GCSEs, which I mostly failed. Throughout the exam period I would spend hours watching the news and scanning the tabloids for stories about my notorious cousin who, prior to his capture, I hadn’t even been aware of. It was like finding out, at the height of Beatlemania, that you were a blood relative of John Lennon.

‘That’s right,’ says Wilf. ‘He wanted to know what it was like to be God.’

‘I’ve never met him or anything,’ I say. ‘I’ve never even been to America.’

‘It’s common apparently, in serial killers,’ Wilf says. ‘to torture animals when they’re kids.’

‘But lots of kids do mad shit and grow up normal,’ I say. When I was six, I cut a worm in half with a spade. It was a bright, sickly hot day; I still clearly remember watching the two separate pieces wriggling, a little flash of red where the cut was made.

When I was a bit older, there was a spate of cat killings nearby. At the school assembly to address this, the head of RE stood at the front of the hall and said:

‘We’ve all done cruel things…crucifying frogs with ice lolly sticks…but this is different.’

Crucifying frogs? Who the fuck crucifies frogs?

‘I never did anything like that when I were a kid,’ Wilf says.

Peter closes his eyes tight like he’s trying to shut something out. Then he opens them

again, and says, ‘Oh, fuck.’

I place a hand on Peter’s shoulder then take it back quickly. ‘You just need a good night’s sleep.’

‘It was worth it though, eh?’ Wilf says.

‘Yeah,’ Peter says, and he goes back to staring into nothingness again.

I take a sip of my IPA. It’s bitter and flowery at the same time and it always makes me feel a bit sick. I should just get the Coors, but the IPA is cheaper and stronger.

‘Control, isn’t it?’ Wilf says. ‘Wanting to be God, I mean. We all want control, even if it’s just over our own lives.’

‘I’d like control,’ I say. For instance, I don’t want to eat dinner at six o’clock with my wife and kids tonight. I want to stay in the pub and get shitfaced. Some nights I’d like to have dinner with my wife and kids, but not every night, just the nights I want to. And I don’t want to get up and drive the 86 bus every morning, but some mornings I don’t mind. Some mornings it’s nice to sit in the cab and drive up and down all day and say ‘hello’ to all the people and to just zone out. But not every morning. Not five fucking mornings a week.

‘He was a quaker,’ Wilf says.

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Your cousin, the Whitfield Strangler.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘He tried all kinds of religions. Like Cat Stevens.’

Wilf screws his face up. ‘Cat Stevens?’

‘The singer,’ I say. I have to supress a sudden urge to knock over all of the pints in front of me.

‘I know who he is, I just don’t know what he’s got to do with the Whitfield Strangler.’

‘Cat Stevens was a seeker,’ I say. ‘He was one of them who tried out all kinds of religions. He was brought up Greek orthodox, but he tried all sorts of hippy meditation shit and new-age things…looking for something to believe in.’

‘Yusef Islam,’ Peter says. Wilf and I smile at his unexpected contribution.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I don’t believe in fuck-all meself.’

‘I hedge my bets,’ Wilf says. ‘You never know.’

‘There’s something,’ Peter says, still staring across the room.

Peter has never been a believer before.

‘What do you think there is?’ Wilf says.

‘Something,’ Peter says. ‘There’s definitely something.’

I don’t like the look in Peter’s eye, like he knows more than he’s letting on. Maybe his three-day mushroom bender revealed something to him, or at least appeared to. In my opinion, “Burning bush” type revelations are almost always the result of some part of the brain backfiring. Moses and Jesus and all those fellas, off their heads in the desert, time and reality distorted by some plant they’d eat to commune with the supreme being. But there’s something about Peter right now, as if he really has seen something beyond, as if all this here in front us, the bare bricks of the pub and the burnt hop smell and the inane conversation, were insignificant.

‘Shit,’ Peter says. He spews out a tiny amount of yellow vomit onto his check shirt. Just a tiny amount, but his face turns red, and he looks like he’s going to cry.

‘It’s alright, lad,’ Wilf says, ‘I’ll get a tissue.’

Wilf goes off, then comes back with a scrunched-up handful of blue-roll. He pats at Peter’s shirt like a professional carer cleaning up an old lady in a care home. I can almost feel the afternoon ending, the cogs grinding to a halt. If I was God, I’d slow down time, make this afternoon last forever, or until I finally missed my wife and kids enough to go home.

Wilf puts the spewy tissue down next to my pint, so close that it’s touching the glass. He smiles at Peter and then at me and I picture myself slitting his stupid throat with a Stanley knife. There’s so much I could do, good and bad, in this world. So many things I could build or knock down. I don’t have to drift along, pushed by time and other people towards an early grave. There are endless possibilities; I could cut my own dick off if I wanted to. I could just start screaming right now and nobody could stop me. I could scream and smash a glass and stick it in Wilf’s face and get my dick out and just fucking…

‘You ok?’ Wilf says, his concern directed at me now.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I was just thinking.’