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seven degrees east - chapter six

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: multiple Rating: E Chapter: 6 / ? Word Count: 5048

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It had started with a shove, John’s flat palm meeting Curt’s chest, warm through his shirt.

No, it had started with one, two, three drinks (and counting?), John aware he was in the wrong mindset to be drinking, but slinging them down his throat anyhow.

Well, no, it had started several days ago, on a night that had engaged all John’s senses. Smell: chemicals, cleaning products, a mopped tile floor. Sound: a cascading splash. Touch: the surprisingly sharp edges of a plastic toilet seat. Taste: bile, sour, coating his tongue. Sight: the one his mind’s eye had insisted on rewinding and replaying, rewinding and replaying, like a VHS tape. Gale and Curt in that classroom. The eagerness of Gale’s body language in particular. The two of them, kissing, kissing, kissing in John’s head as he bent it over the bowl and heaved.

Fast forward and there was John grinning after the shove, smug like he’d already won—ironic, when he felt like the loss of Gale had been the most agonizing of his life. He cocked his head to the side, tough guy, taunting Curt with his body the way he believed he’d been taunted by Curt’s, all tangled up in his best friend’s. People were turning, people were looking. The look on Curt’s face was reluctant, but John didn’t like that. What he liked was how Curt’s body had gone tense. Yes, he thought. He danced forward and tapped Curt’s chest with just his fingertips this time, then danced back.

Curt was still restraining himself, smiling over clenched teeth, so John said, “Hit me.”

“Why?” Curt asked, like John’s demand was exhausting.

John’s eyes glittered with rage and alcohol.

“You fuckin’ know why,” he said, quieter. The coming fight? Sure, he was alright with that being for the assembling audience, but the point of it was for he and Curt alone.

Curt didn’t move, and John wasn’t proud of himself then; he began to berate his erstwhile friend, to insult him. It made him feel like shit to say the things he said, but like the vomit he’d spewed into that toilet, the words just kept coming up. He had a feeling his body might not stop until he got them all out, and he had no idea how many were in there, all jammed up in his esophagus, all packed tight around his heart.

Apparently, they could be halted by an outside force: Curt’s fist connected with his jaw.

There was the zing of pain, then, confusingly, the sound of knuckles making contact seemed to come to John afterwards. He blinked, disoriented, and was slightly humiliated to find himself hunched over, cupping his face. He glanced up at Curt—who looked torn between pale remorse and a pissed-off flush over the dickish things John had just been saying—and grinned through the ache. He groaned loudly as he straightened up.

“Again,” he said. “Bitch.”

Again, time fell out of order. John would’ve sworn he’d felt the crack that stingingly clipped his cheekbone before he watched Curt’s shoulder drop to throw the hit.

The crowd went wooooah as John staggered back. He touched his face for blood, but found none when he examined his fingertips. His skin felt hot though. His eyes met Curt’s once more. Now it was Curt who appeared to be in pain. The anger had flown from his face like a helium balloon from a child’s careless fist. Perversely, John began trying to soothe him.

“It’s ok, Curt, I don’t even feel it,” he promised. What he did feel was rain. It was beginning to come, a faint patter that dotted his face and pinged off the patio table.

Curt didn’t seem to know what to do, but John did. Now, he could fight back. He could take two hits like two shots of tequila, chased with a wince but not the end of the night. He stepped towards Curt. However he was behaving, John was smart enough to know not to take his eyes off his opponent—especially one he’d seen in action in the past, though never against him. That was the reason why he didn’t notice someone shouldering the other spectators aside. Abruptly, there was a warm hand on his chest, and John turned with a little confusion and a lot of annoyance. His emotions spiderwebbed like cracked glass when he saw it was Gale’s hand on him. So possessive all of a sudden. It made John laugh. It wasn’t a nice sound.

“Fuck off,” he said lightly.

But Gale grabbed his shirt and half spun him away from Curt. It worked because John hadn’t been expecting it. Oh, now Gale wanted to touch him? Now Gale wanted somebody else to play rough with? Didn’t he have Curt for that?

“You fucking fuck off,” Gale uttered under his breath, face startlingly close to John’s. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Settling something,” John said shortly. He pushed Gale away, but Gale’s grip was strong, tugging his shirt.

“You’re smarter than this.”

“I said, fuck off.” John wrenched Gale’s hand free and turned away from him. Curt was still standing there, and with his chin, John urged him forward. This time, he raised his fists too.

But Gale got in the way, got in between.

“Christ, John,” he snapped. “Fight the right person if you wanna fight so bad!”

This stalled John. He looked between Curt and Gale a few times before sticking with Gale.

“What?”

“You’re not mad at Curt—”

John released a derisive laugh.

“—you’re mad at me,” Gale finished. “So take it out on me.”

John attempted to sidestep him to get to his target—the rain was falling harder, the grass was getting slick underfoot—but Gale matched him, as if they were dancing. His hand was back on John’s chest. It kept the middle of his t-shirt dry.

“Don’t hit Curt,” Gale said steadily. “Hit me.”

“I don’t want to hit you,” John said, just above a whisper.

Gale matched his volume when he replied, “Yes you do.”

He didn’t though, and felt angry all over again at Gale if Gale didn’t know that. He never wanted to hurt Gale, never Gale. Or maybe he did, but not with his fists. John didn’t think that was cruel enough for what Gale had so thoughtlessly done to him.

“It was once, John. It was once.” Gale’s voice was soft and insistent, his eyes working hard to hold John’s, who tried over and over to glance away and sneer, to signal that this was all bullshit, beneath him. He pretended he’d barely heard so that he wouldn’t have to actually listen and understand.

John turned away from them both. As he walked away, Bubbles appeared at his side, offering to get ice for the side of his face that was probably red, was probably already bruising. John just shook his head and pounded up the back stairs into the house, ignoring Bubbles’ heavy sigh.

—

He’d missed the whole thing. That was what Nash would learn later—not at the party, not on the ride back to campus, but outside the dorms the next day, when he would corner Bubbles and ask what the hell had happened. (Specifically, why did John’s face look like that?) By the time John had started egging Curt on, Nash had been long gone. Gone from the backyard, gone from earshot, gone, frankly, from that plane of reality. Where he’d gone was Helen’s room, and even later, once he’d been filled in, he would be happy with his choice.

After inhabiting the dorm with the boys, Helen’s living space was a revelation to Nash. Granted, as roommates went, Rosie was tidy, and his prized record collection and player weren’t exactly clutter. But Helen’s bedroom was an explosion of femininity. If there were a feminist way to have that thought, then that was the way Nash was having it. Like an eclipse, the serious covers of Helen’s second-wave feminist texts dominated her bookshelves and bedside table, but a more traditionally girly aesthetic played around the edges of Fear of Flying and Our Bodies, Ourselves. He saw a Blondie poster. He saw a jewellery box. He saw a pair of perfume bottles that to his eye resembled magical elixirs, and which almost immediately became unimportant as he gathered Helen in his arms and smelled the scent on her neck.

He didn’t kiss her, not quite, not yet. He thought she probably wanted him to (because of the way he’d spoken to her outside, because of the way she’d slipped her hand into his and given it an urgent tug), and it wasn’t the shrine to the feminist movement that was holding him back. No, Nash thought that was pretty incredible, and that a woman who knew her rights and respected her body (and, equally, respected her rights and knew her body) was to be worshipped, not feared. What held him off was a feeling of connection he didn’t think he could explain in words. Oh, Nash had seen it before. He’d seen it between Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. But never in his own life. When Helen spoke, he only wanted to listen. When he leaned towards Helen, she leaned in too. There was something, Nash thought, to how she made him feel confident and bashful at the same time. There was certainly something to his hand on her back, just then, and her hands sliding over his shoulders before she hooked her wrists at the nape of his neck.

“If you want me to kiss you,” he said, smiling because he couldn’t help it, “just say so.”

Helen smiled back knowingly. Her face came closer, nose almost skimming his.

“Maybe I want to be the one to kiss you.”

“I think I could handle that.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I could not feel less threatened by the idea of you taking the lead,” Nash swore.

“And instead you feel…?” Helen’s eyebrows rose with amusement as she awaited his response.

It came quickly (quicker than Nash was hoping to as things progressed): “Turned on.”

Her laugh was sudden, clear, and genuine. It made him beam, his eyes roaming her face to absorb the beauty of how hers squinted shut in delight, how her head fell back. Everything he was feeling wedged in his throat, but it wasn’t painful, and he didn’t mind when Helen trapped it there by pressing her mouth against his.

Heat surged up in Nash, and maybe he could hear voices rising from the backyard now, but they were faint, muffled by Helen’s bedroom window—which was closed, like her door. A house full of people and they were a world away. Characters like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had to climb over their picket fences and push away from their familiar riverbanks to find adventure. Not Nash. A Twainian impishness guided the quick kisses he gave back to Helen, traded like Magic: The Gathering cards. It was playful, how he moved from kissing her mouth to kissing her face, how her lips found his jaw, then ran lower, making him shiver as she sucked his neck. His shirt came off first, and by the time they had swayed and shuffled their way over to her twin bed, he was brushing the skirt up her thighs as he sat back and she climbed onto his lap.

Helen rubbed him through denim before undoing his jeans. Nash was overwhelmed by how good it was—not just her touch, but the breathy yeses that seemed to vent his pleasure from her mouth.

“You’re unreal,” he said.

Helen smiled.

“What do you mean?”

Her hand was inside his boxers now, tucked away like a secret. She stroked him and he kept his eyes on hers as he moaned. He watched her cheeks turn the colour of the empty raspberry bin he’d seen—to his disappointment—at the grocery store yesterday: a dark pink stain.

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Nash babbled. He couldn’t quit staring at her, astride him. There were freckles on her thighs, just above her knees, that told a story of sitting outside in the sun. “‘We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep,’” he offered in hopeless, lovestruck explanation.

“The Scarlet Letter,” Helen said, and then she kissed him deeply and let him hold her close to roll her onto her back.

She slipped off her underwear, but then he was too impatient to wait for the removal of her skirt, which had buttons. He ate her out with the skirt flipped up like an umbrella inverted in a stiff breeze. Her groans were low and caused the hair on his arms to stand on end. When he lightened his licks to make her chase him, Helen simply grabbed the back of his head to make him, in turn, stop teasing her. Nash smiled between her legs.

An orgasm later, they flipped for who got to provide the condom. Heads (appropriately): Nash. Tails: Helen. This, they decided, would be the most equitable method.

Nash was so excited he fumbled the flip and the coin rolled away under Helen’s bed. They laughed and got on with things. They didn’t really need a coin to tell them they were equals; he never treated her like she was anything less. Naked between her baby-blue sheets, Nash was more than happy to take the condom he was handed.

—

John could hear the sounds coming from behind the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall and hoped one of his friends was lucky enough to be responsible for half of them. He was willing to give his blessing because, whoever was in there, he knew it wasn’t Curt and Gale.

He wasn’t listening on purpose—god no. He’d come to use the upstairs bathroom instead of waiting for the one downstairs. On the way up, John had passed Crosby on the steps. He hadn’t tried to give Crosby any particular look, but Crosby’s face had flushed with something that might have been guilt or shame or just enjoyment. John’s gaze had shifted to Sandra, who was coming down after Crosby, but her face gave absolutely nothing away. Quickly, John had decided he didn’t want to know, he didn’t fucking want to know. He didn’t want to be a guy who knew things—or, especially, saw things—anymore.

“Croz,” he’d said.

“John.”

Seeing Crosby with Sandra, no matter what it meant, had turned John abruptly morose. He was alone at a party. He had shunned Bubbles, lost track of Nash, goaded Curt into hitting him, and Gale… Gale was a hazy, angry fog John wasn’t ready to feel his way into. The night was sunk, as far as he was concerned, so he’d elected to play to his strengths until it was time to leave: he would get very, very drunk.

“Can I get my keys?” John had requested, sticking out his palm.

Crosby had studied him while pretending not to. John had rolled his eyes.

“I’m not going to drive. I just want some fuckin’ peace and quiet.”

He did not look at Sandra. He didn’t know her, but he didn’t need her to know that he planned to lift a bottle of something clear from the kitchen and go drink it alone in his jeep. Thankfully, Crosby had obliged without voicing a guess at John’s likely movements.

John used the bathroom (these girls had nice-smelling soap) and wended his way back downstairs. Alcohol acquired, he went towards the front door. He didn’t remember about Rosie and Liss until he was close enough to see out the door’s window that they were still sitting on the front step, sheltered from the rain and staring into one another’s eyes. John swallowed, feeling a pressure in his sinuses he attributed to the change in weather.

After retreating, he discovered a door from the house into the garage. He went in and shut the door behind him. When he turned, he discovered he was not alone.

She had pale blonde hair, and at first, John thought she was standing in the rain. The garage door was open, the damp seeping across the concrete pad, the stranger, the woman, positioned like a sentinel between indoors and out. Because she had her back to him and the violence of the rainstorm had just increased—seemingly right as John stepped into the garage (would the boys from the backyard go into the house now, would they wonder where he was?)—he realized she mustn’t have known he was there until he was next to her. She flinched, but barely, and then her stare was cool.

“Another social butterfly,” he said sarcastically, smiling to show he meant no harm, and that he included himself in that particular club.

“Maybe that’s it,” she allowed. “Maybe my wings are too wet to fly inside.”

She appraised him then, taking in the vodka. They’d each taken a slug from the mouth of the bottle before they bothered with names.

“Paulina,” she told him.

“Bucky.” He didn’t want to hear this beautiful, guarded woman say “John.”

“A strange name.”

He shrugged, then asked, “Bride or groom?”

Paulina frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“Sorry,” John said. “Whose guest are you at this thing? Who do you know inside?”

“Ah. All three of the girls, but Sandra most. Maybe you don’t have as many friends here as I do?” She pointed at the parts of his face that were sore.

He huffed a laugh.

“Nah, a friend did this, believe it or not.” It was the simplest explanation. “How do you know Sandra?”

Paulina watched him warily, but said, “We are both graduate students in the School of Politics, she in International Security, I in International Relations. I came here from Poland to study, as I’m sure you can hear.”

“Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but I don’t exactly sound local either.”

She raised the bottle to toast that, and they both took another swallow. John wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He liked how she watched him.

“So,” he said, “International Relations.” His tone was not flirtation-free.

“That’s right.”

“What about domestic relations? You got a boyfriend?”

“Why, do you want to sleep with me?” Paulina asked bluntly.

John laughed and grinned.

“I’d kinda like the answer to my question before I answer yours,” he said.

“I did,” she replied at last. “But now he’s dead.”

“He’s dead?” Bucky repeated, aghast and uncertain he’d heard her right. He had to wait until Paulina’d had another drink to hear her response.

“To me,” she clarified. “What about you? Someone here? Back in America maybe?”

John smiled tightly and said, “Unattached.”

“Not as dramatic as me,” Paulina noted.

“No.”

“Or lying.”

“Yeah,” John allowed, taking the bottle back. “Possibly lying. To myself.”

“That’s moronic,” she pronounced as he drank. “Now you answer my question: do you want to sleep with me?”

John swallowed.

“Sleep? No. I’d like to fuck you though, if you’d be interested in that.”

Paulina returned the look he then gave her with a level one of her own. Despite his words, John lost his nerve a little in the face of her frankness and lifted the vodka again to his lips for cover, but she caught his wrist and guided his hand back down. Suddenly, they were making out—heated, hungry—and the nearest raindrops shone in the garage light while the rest could only be heard falling in the dark, making it look as though the rain fell only around them. But no one looked, no one saw, and Paulina’s hands were on John’s chest, and John’s hands were on Paulina’s back, his index finger hooked around the mouth of the bottle.

She wore a top the colour of a dove in the shade, an impervious urban grey, with a low, square neckline and cap sleeves. John pulled one of those little sleeves off her shoulder, then kissed the skin he’d revealed. She didn’t smell like anything much, but the scent of rain invaded, turning the air around them earthy and herbaceous.

“You know,” he told the crook where Paulina’s shoulder met her neck. “I was just supposed to be passing through.”

“On your way to…?”

“My jeep. It’s parked right there.” He straightened and pointed it out to her, there at the curb. The Wrangler sat beyond the reach of the porchlight, under the shade of the night and the majestic beech tree that grew on the front lawn. Its windows were dark. Too dark to see inside.

“You know my answer to your question,” John reminded her, spreading his arms. Take me or leave me. Help me or hurt me, I think I can still take it.

“Alright,” Paulina decided. “I’m bored of the party, and you seem sweet.”

“What’d I say to give you that impression?”

She smiled and touched a finger to his lips.

“It’s when you stop talking.”

Her eyes were significantly kinder than her words. John almost wanted to ask about the other guy, the ex-boyfriend, but that would leave him more open than he felt he could currently bear. He handed her the vodka, dug the keys he’d retrieved from Crosby from his pocket, and they made a run for the Wrangler along the side of the driveway farthest from the front door, where other parked cars would shield them from view.

Inside the jeep, Paulina was as eager as John. He leaned forward from the back seat to deposit the bottle on the floor by the pedals, then they set about single-mindedly shedding their own clothes and each other’s. John pulled a condom from his wallet—stowed there with miserable intent—and grunted when Paulina sat in his lap and guided him inside her.

Her style (at least with him) was slow and in-control, rolling her hips in a way that reminded him, second by second, how long it’d been since he’d last gotten laid. He just hadn’t been looking. Rather than recalling a single moment when he might’ve decided to give celibacy a shot, John could only remember Gale. Nights with Gale, days with Gale. Gale’s smile he worked so hard to earn. Gale’s fair hair…

At John’s urging, he and Paulina rearranged so they were no longer face to face with her blonde hair swishing with each rise and fall. She was on her hands and knees. He was behind her, hunched below the ceiling, thrusting harder, the windows fogging because they were both panting. The steady, soothing rhythm of rain beat the jeep’s roof. John could forget; he could let himself. It wasn’t hard, he’d been reminded, to find someone and just feel good for a while. Feel like a whole person. Every time he sunk into Paulina, stomach tightening as he snapped his hips forward, John was looking for him, that scattered self of his, that Peter Pan shadow to sew back onto the soles of his feet.

He was getting close, reaching down to fondle Paulina’s breasts, cursing when it made her clench around his cock. Bent as he was, John tipped his face back, breathing hard. His hips seemed to shuttle all on their own now. And then something harder than rain struck the window of the jeep. John thought it was probably a fallen branch—maybe not so smart to park under the big old beech during a storm. Half-dazed with the impending release that was sure to turn him inside out (maybe that would be where he felt complete), he swung his head around to see if the window behind him had been chipped or cracked. It was all fogged up, and he couldn’t tell, so he wiped the sweat from his forehead and the condensation from the window, swirling his palm on the cool plastic. Gale’s face appeared beyond the hazy smear.

John instinctually doubted that it was real. He was hammered, he was about to come, and the face was surrounded by a green glow. It was just the porchlight refracting off the beech tree’s leaves, but John had read The Great Gatsby half a dozen times, so seeing just refracted light was impossible; he saw longing—dangerous, delusional, and yet lifechanging longing. When Gale shifted, John knew he was real. He knew that he too had been seen as Gale peered through the window he had just wiped clear.

It happened so quickly—that the face appeared, that John stilled in shock—but Paulina was close too, and she moved when he didn’t. She flung her hips back against his. He was staring straight at Gale when his eyebrows drew together and his mouth dropped open and he came with a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. With the streaky window between them, it was Gale who appeared soft-edged and insubstantial while John felt solid and grounded; his arms around Paulina’s waist; his knees, toes, and the balls of his feet on the jeep’s cloth seat; his cock, of course, deep inside the woman his body mostly blocked from Gale’s view. It was an epic disaster, and it was a staggering revelation.

Gale stumbled backwards, out of sight, and John, somehow both buzzing and numb, swivelled back to Paulina and slid his hand down between her legs to rub hard at her clit until she came too.

Afterwards, they put their underwear back on and quietly and companionably shared the back seat. Paulina sat and drank a little more, offhandedly mentioning her ex, idly wondering what he was doing just then, wondering if her friends back home had told him when she’d moved away. John laid on his back with his knees bent up, his head on Paulina’s lap. He smoked. He thought about Gale. He was troubled by the fact that he couldn’t remember what expression Gale had worn at the instant of realization. Had Gale looked uncomfortable, embarrassed, upset, fed-up? The moment had come and it had gone, so selfishly, John thought, and it had left him to examine everything he’d unsuccessfully attempted to repress—with simmering silence in their dorm, with alcohol, with the force of Curt’s fist driving into his face. Right then, he felt none of what he’d been carrying around since the night at the Barracks. He felt only a sense of peace. He exhaled.

—

Gale’s mind was full of rats, and all the rats were running. It was pure Pinky and the Brain up there, only Gale didn’t know the scheme and he couldn’t tell the smart rats from the stupid, the evil rats from the benign. He only felt as though his skull were a housing for constant, nonsensical motion.

Externally, he was sitting next to John in the back of the Wrangler. They coasted smoothly along in the dark. Crosby and Bubbles were up front, the latter behind the wheel. Somewhere on the road ahead of them was Curt, driving Rosie’s car. Nash hadn’t bothered responding from behind Helen’s bedroom door, but Rosie had put in a disheveled appearance after emerging from Liss’s room, grinning and tossing Curt the keys. Rosie and Nash would get a ride back to campus the following day. “Lucky sons a’ bitches,” Curt had proclaimed, smile belying his resentful words.

Gale had chosen the back seat on purpose, because he knew something the boys in the front didn’t, and he had chosen this side on purpose too: he sat where John had kneeled. John had said nothing as they’d opened opposite doors, as they’d climbed into the back, as they’d buckled in. He had only (and quickly) asked the boys to unzip their windows in order to circulate the air, probably hoping, Gale knew, that Bubbles and Crosby wouldn’t smell anything besides the stale scent of cigarettes and warm, wet pavement from the rain that continued to lightly fall. It was misting through the windows, and Gale could feel the fine spray if he leaned towards the door.

Occasionally, a car would pass, headed in the other direction, and Gale would see raindrops caught in their headlights. They appeared from nowhere, from blackness, disappeared into the same, but in between, gave the illusion of being miraculously suspended. Shining like crystals on a chandelier.

He'd seen himself in the window first, before he’d realized John was inside. Gale’s eyes had glanced across his own fuzzy reflection. He’d seen himself and thought, Failure. He’d been mad at first, mad that John had unleased whatever the hell that had been in the backyard, sniping at Curt until he’d thrown a punch, then a second one. But once he’d made sure Curt was alright—and he was; alarmed, annoyed, but alright—all Gale had wanted was to find John. He’d flicked the jeep’s window and, not seeing John emerge immediately, had felt defeated that he’d only managed to discover another John-less location. Just his own blurry portrait staring back at him from the thick plastic window. And then: John.

And Gale had left him because he hadn’t been able to stand it, because he’d understood, because running away was the wiser second impulse that had followed his initial one. Which had been to yank open the door. Gale hadn’t acted on it, but he’d had his hand on the handle. He remembered the rain-slicked metal in his grip. He remembered, just as clearly, the feeling that had flooded him when he’d seen that entirely new expression on John’s face. If it was what John had been feeling since the other night, Gale didn’t know how John had shunned him all this time. He didn’t want to avoid him; it was why he hadn’t ridden in Rosie’s car with Curt.

It was after midnight, the interior of the jeep drowsy and full of the sound of the wet road rushing past under their wheels. In the dark, Gale’s fingers crept across the seat and stopped just shy of touching John’s. It was jealousy he had felt. It was a sudden certainty that John was his.

Gale watched with longing as John pressed his cheek to the plastic window and tilted his face to feel the rain.

#my writing #seven degrees east #MotA #Masters of the Air #MotA fic #John 'Bucky' Egan #Bucky x Buck #Curtis Biddick #Gale 'Buck' Cleven #Joseph 'Bubbles' Payne #Herbert Nash #Helen (MotA)#Paulina (MotA)#Harry Crosby #Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal

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thepastisalreadywritten · 8 months

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By Parissa DJangi

August 18, 2023

Some say he was a surgeon. Others, a deranged madman — or perhaps a butcher, prince, artist, or specter.

The murderer known to history as Jack the Ripper terrorized London 135 years ago this fall.

In the subsequent century, he has been everything to everyone, a dark shadow on which we pin our fears and attitudes.

But to five women, Jack the Ripper was not a legendary phantom or a character from a detective novel — he was the person who horrifically ended their lives.

“Jack the Ripper was a real person who killed real people,” reiterates historian Hallie Rubenhold, whose book, The Five, chronicles the lives of his victims. “He wasn’t a legend.”

Who were these women? They had names: Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

They also had hopes, loved ones, friends, and, in some cases, children.

Their lives, each one unique, tell the story of 19th-century London, a city that pushed them to its margins and paid more attention to them dead than alive.

Terror in Whitechapel

Their stories did not all begin in London, but they ended there, in and around the crowded corner of the metropolis known as Whitechapel, a district in London’s East End.

“Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London,” Walter Bessant wrote in his novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men in 1882.

“It is even neglected by its own citizens, who had never yet perceived their abandoned condition.”

The “abandoned” citizens of Whitechapel included some of the city’s poorest residents.

Immigrants, transient laborers, families, single women, thieves — they all crushed together in overflowing tenements, slums, and workhouses.

According to historian Judith Walkowitz:

“By the 1880s, Whitechapel had come to epitomize the social ills of ‘Outcast London,’ a place where sin and poverty comingled in the Victorian imagination, shocking the middle classes."

Whitechapel transformed into a scene of horror when the lifeless, mutilated body of Polly Nichols was discovered on a dark street in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888.

She became the first of Jack the Ripper’s five canonical victims, the core group of women whose murders appeared to be related and occurred over a short span of time.

Over the next month, three more murdered women would be found on the streets of the East End.

They had been killed in a similar way: their throats slashed, and, in most cases, their abdomens disemboweled.

Some victims’ organs had been removed. The fifth murder occurred on November 9, when the Ripper butchered Mary Jane Kelly with such barbarity that she was nearly unrecognizable.

This so-called “Autumn of Terror” pushed Whitechapel and the entire city into a panic, and the serial killer’s mysterious identity only heightened the drama.

The press sensationalized the astonishingly grisly murders — and the lives of the murdered women.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane

Though forever linked by the manner of their death, the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper shared something else in common:

They were among London’s most vulnerable residents, living on the margins of Victorian society.

They eked out a life in the East End, drifting in and out of workhouses, piecing together casual jobs, and pawning their few possessions to afford a bed for a night in a lodging house.

If they could not scrape together the coins, they simply slept on the street.

“Nobody cared about who these women were at all,” Rubenhold says. “Their lives were incredibly precarious.”

Polly Nichols knew precarity well. Born in 1845, she fulfilled the Victorian ideal of proper womanhood when she became a wife at the age of 18.

But after bearing five children, she ultimately left her husband under suspicions of his infidelity.

Alcohol became both a crutch and curse for her in the final years of her life.

Alcohol also hastened Annie Chapman’s estrangement from what was considered a respectable life.

Annie Chapman was born in 1840 and spent most of her life in London and Berkshire.

With her marriage to John Chapman, a coachman, in 1869, Annie positioned herself in the top tier of the working class.

But her taste for alcohol and the loss of her children unraveled her family life, and Annie ended up in the East End.

Swedish-born Elizabeth Stride was an immigrant, like thousands of others who lived in the East End.

Born in 1843, she came to England when she was 22. In London, Stride reinvented herself time and time again, becoming a wife and coffeehouse owner.

Catherine Eddowes, who was born in Wolverhampton in 1842 and moved to London as a child, lost both of her parents by the time she was 15.

She spent most of her adulthood with one man, who fathered her children. Before her murder, she had just returned to London after picking hops in Kent, a popular summer ritual for working-class Londoners.

At 25, Mary Jane Kelly was the youngest, and most mysterious, of the Ripper’s victims.

Kelly reportedly claimed she came from Ireland and Wales before settling in London.

She had a small luxury that the others did not: She rented a room with a bed. It would become the scene of her murder.

Yet the longstanding belief that all of these women were sex workers is a myth, as Rubenhold demonstrates in The Five.

Only two of the women — Stride and Kelly — were known to have engaged in sex work during their lives.

The fact that all of them have been labeled sex workers highlights how Victorians saw poor, unhoused women.

“They have been systematically ‘othered’ from society,” Rubenhold says,"even though this is how the majority lived.”

These women were human beings with a strong sense of personhood. According to biographer Robert Hume, their friends and neighbors described them as “industrious,” “jolly,” and “very clean.”

They lived, they loved, they existed — until, very suddenly on a dark night in 1888, they did not.

A long shadow

The discovery of Annie Chapman’s body on September 8 heightened panic in London, since her wounds echoed the shocking brutality of Polly Nichols’ murder days earlier.

Investigators realized that the same killer had likely committed both crimes — and he was still on the loose. Who would he strike next?

In late September, London’s Central News Office received a red-inked letter that claimed to be from the murderer. It was signed “Jack the Ripper.”

Papers across the city took the name and ran with it. Press coverage of the Whitechapel Murders crescendoed to a fever pitch.

Newspapers danced the line between fact and fiction, breathlessly recounting every gruesome detail of the crimes and speculating with wild abandon about the killer’s identity.

Today, that impulse endures, and armchair detectives and professional investigators alike have proposed an endless parade of suspects, including artist Walter Sickert, writer Lewis Carroll, sailor Carl Feigenbaum, and Aaron Kosminski, an East End barber.

"The continued fascination with unmasking the murderer perpetuates this idea that Jack the Ripper is a game,” Rubenhold says.

She sees parallels between the gamification of the Whitechapel Murders and the modern-day obsession with true crime.

“When we approach true crime, most of the time we approach as if it was legend, as if it wasn’t real, as if it didn’t happen to real people.”

“These crimes still happen today, and we are still not interested in the victims,” Rubenhold laments.

The Whitechapel Murders remain unsolved after 135 years, and Rubenhold believes that will never change:

“We’re not going to find anything that categorically tells us who Jack the Ripper is.”

Instead, the murders tell us about the values of the 19th century — and the 21st.

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