It could have been any kind of modelling shoot, with the blonde windswept on
the beach. Except this is Mo Hayder and, as befits one of the most
successful - and most violent - crime writers, she clambers out of the
Thames, drenched to her tiny thighs, exclaiming “My bones!”
Where others could see only pebbles and broken bottles, there in her delicate
hands are two coppery pieces of skeleton, one part of a jaw, with teeth, the
other looking like a baby's pelvis. Human? “Nah, animal,” she says, stroking
them with expert confidence.
“But it's interesting to find them - reminds me of Adam, who was found a
little way upstream,” she says, talking of the boy's torso discovered nearly
seven years ago floating in London's river.
That case inspired her latest and fifth novel, Ritual, which opens with its
heroine, a police diver, finding a severed hand in Bristol harbour. It goes
on to delve into a dark world of African human sacrifice, as practised here
in Britain, in the grotesque and psychologically disturbing manner that has
earned her so many fans around the world. It may surprise (and disappoint?)
them to know that it does not feature hardcore violence against women or
children, but replaces it with another taboo - race.
Hayder has been a sensation. Her debut, Birdman, published in 2000, was an
international bestseller; her second, The Treatment, won the 2002 W.H.Smith
Thumping Good Read award. Tokyo, her third novel, won the Elle magazine
crime fiction prize, the SNCF Prix Polar, and was nominated for three Crime
Writers' Association dagger awards. Pig Island, her fourth bestseller, was
published in April 2006 and was nominated for a CWA dagger.
Exceptionally bright, friendly and chatty, Hayder is an excellent person with
whom to strip off one's socks, drying them on the pub radiator while sipping
a hot chocolate. But it will only be a few minutes before she says something
that jolts you out of cosy. Suddenly you forget her other life, as Somerset
mother, and you're plunged in murky waters. Take, for instance, her
description of the quarry diving she did as research for Ritual.
“I could see the next section of the quarry, farther down, and it was like a
siren call, I just wanted to go deeper. That image of what happens in diving
accidents, when people just start swimming inexorably downwards ... I find
it almost beautiful.”
Other writers famous for testing the limits of acceptability - and their
readers' stomachs - such as J.G.Ballard, Patricia Cornwell, or James Ellroy,
share the memory of being victims of or witnesses to violence while young.
Their books are a kind of purging. But what of Hayder? She and her brother
were brought up in a safe middle-class bubble, the children of a teacher and
an academic, their mother especially sensitive to violence and keen to
shield them from it.
“I have a really normal background. Like most mothers, mine wanted to protect
our innocence. That was the last thing I wanted, I wanted to throw my
innocence out the window.”
This she did with aplomb, leaving school at 15, exploring the seedier side of
life in London, and then Tokyo, where she worked as a hostess in a
nightclub. She felt herself as a kind of lightning rod for violence:
suicides, murders and untimely deaths happened around her. When she then
moved to Los Angeles to study film, she made cute Wallace and Gromit
Claymation-style cartoons - in which the creatures pulled each other's heads
off and ate them.
Her parents, she said, were protective because they had known violence at
first hand. “They remembered the war, they didn't have to theorise about
what it was like.” Her mother, although proud, still finds it difficult to
read her books.
By contrast, sheltered Hayder was compelled by what it means to be frightened.
“There must be something in the human spirit that needs to feel what a fight
is; there is something atavistic in us that hungers for it. Why else do we
spend a fortune at Disneyland getting thrown around?”
For most people this is an occasional thrill; for Hayder, her working life is
steeped in gore. Angry with the Agatha Christie style, in which bodies are
tweely positioned behind floral curtains (“you never get to see the brain
tissue”), Hayder befriended Britain's leading forensic pathologists and
murder detectives.
“The emotionally difficult part is the research. I remember the first time I
left a pathologist's office, on a beautiful sunny day, I was shaking. I
thought I'd never sleep again.”
But sleep peacefully she does, in the bed where she writes on her laptop. This
is where reality and fiction meet. It leads to situations unfamiliar to
other working mothers, such as when she refused to let her daughter come to
the morgue.
“She had a major tantrum, because she wanted to go to the hospital where the
dead people were, with Mummy.”
I wondered if she has trouble writing about violence against children since
she and her partner had their daughter six years ago. No, she said, quite
the opposite. Ritual is the first in a series of five, and the third, which
she is about to start, “is all about children being attacked”.
“What it has made me want to do is go back and rewrite one of my books, The
Treatment, where a mother is forced to watch her child being attacked by a
paedophile. When I wrote it, it felt very false. Now I know I could write it
so much more easily.”
Other parents might find this hard to understand, but for Hayder the act of
imagining the very worst comforts her, by protecting against it ever coming
true. People such as her are pessimists for the same reason, she says.
“You deal with it by turning away, I deal with it by looking straight at it,
and absorbing it until it's got no power. There is a superstitious element
to it, that it will ward off evil - though of course that means nothing.”
In the acknowledgements to Ritual, Hayder thanks her child, who “keeps the
world turning when nothing else is right”.
“I've got a difficult head to live in, and just her existence brings so much
joy.”
But Hayder wants to do nothing to protect her innocence. Will she let her read
her books, which are too dark for some adults?
“I'll never, ever, censor anything from her.”
However young she is? She pauses.
“Yes. Maybe that makes me a bad parent. But I was brought up sheltered from
the horrors of the world, and when I had to deal with it, I was on my own.
When she confronts it, I want to be there with her. If I'm watching a horror
film, and she walks in, I'll never turn it off. I think that's the biggest
insult.”
But don't children become better able to cope with the evils of the world as
they get older?
“At what age do you get that capacity? I still can't deal with it, I'm still
shocked by human nature. She's the one that tells me, when we're watching
Doctor Who, ‘don't worry, it's not real'.”
It is, as you might expect, an uncompromising stance that forces you to
examine your own morals.
“I'm not,” she says with a wry smile, “writing a book about parenting.”
And that is both a relief - and a great shame.
Ritual by Mo Hayder
Bantam, £14.99
Book Extract
Mossy lies on his back, tears running down his face. The room is still, now.
At last it has stopped its rolling, its thumping like a giant heart, and
he's grateful at least for that. He takes a few breaths. It's daytime on the
other side of the grille, very close, a car's just pulled up. Maybe it's the
other coming back because the place has been empty for hours. They've left
him here with the locked gate, Will Smith looking at him impassively over
his rocket-launcher and Brad Pitt frowning, the sun glinting off his
breastplate.
It's the first time in what seems a lifetime that the pain has gone down to a
level where he can concentrate, to think about his situation. He's no idea
how long it is since Uncle took his hands. Lately time's been slipping all
over the place, he's been in a fever, he knows that, and somewhere in the
fever he's lost track of who he is and where he's located in the world. He
closes his eyes and tries to think his way back, but all he can remember are
the first few hours when he came round from the drug.
It was like being hurtled into a white wall, or taken into space and set
spinning with no sense of up or down. It was a pain like nothing he'd
experienced, worse than the agonies, worse than the ulceration he'd had on
his leg at Christmas. He lay on the sofa and howled, his arms clamped
between his legs, the inside seam of his jeans pressed hard on the wounds as
if he might stop the agony. He didn't dare look at what they'd done to him.
Skinny sat with him, trying to keep him calm, giving him a hit regularly,
using his hard little fingers deftly and pushing the needle gently through
the skin, always taking time to find a place that wasn't already broken. It
was only on the second day, when he'd screamed just about all he could, that
Mossy got up the courage to look. He waited until Skinny had given him a hit
and, gulping hard because he thought he'd puke, he did it. He looked at the
place his hands had been. He held his arms up. His head went dead for a
moment, wouldn't move, all he could do was stare.
