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1996

Ray Archer

Visiting Ray’s parents in Smethwick

  • They’re having a party and we’re invited.
  • Ray and I are staying in the guest bedroom.

Is Ray’s dad a pornographer?

  • Page 3 boobs were all over the place which was a bit embarrassing I thought.
  • Ray’s dad maybe had a small business as a photographer running out of the house.
  • In his little area where he did that, near the sitting room, he had a photo of a lovely young black woman on the wall and she was naked - at least the top half of her was.
  • The photo was cut off just above the boobs so it was obvious there was no way she was actually wearing anything on top.
  • I asked Ray about her and he told me that was his dad’s job of sorts, portrait photographer, and she lived down the road.

Looking at their photos

  • Ray’s dad shows us hours and hours of family photos he’s put on VHS!
  • Hours, like over three hours we all sat in the living room and looked at these photos and I thought I might die of boredom, but I was polite.
  • A test of some sort?

A party at their house

  • The next evening they had a party.
  • Was it someone’s birthday, I can’t remember?
  • Did Ray introduce his uncle as a swinger? I think he did.
  • There was a lot of drinking…
  • I was already probably a bit high on something as I wasn’t hearing anyone and Ray’s mum comes up to me and says, they want you to go upstairs, and I ask, Who? and she says Ray.
  • So I go up the stairs into the guest bedroom and his dad and uncle are sitting on the bed and the dad says come over so I go over.
  • And the next thing I remember is waking up completely naked in the bed and it’s late at night and I cannot find any of my clothes.
  • Ray is asleep and I’m saying, where is my underwear and he’s pretending not to hear me.
  • Whoever undressed me couldn’t have cared less that I would not be able to find my clothes.

Has Ray told his mum we’re visiting to borrow money?

  • The next morning just before we were leaving, I had the weirdest set-up conversation with Ray’s mum.
  • Before I did, Ray says, “my mum wants to talk to you about something, and make sure you shout your answers loudly because she’s deaf”.
  • He goes into the kitchen with his dad and they hover at the door.
  • Ray’s mum starts talking about mortgage deposits to me. I have zero idea what’s she’s going on about.
  • Later I wonder if Ray’s whole purpose of inviting me to his parents was to ask them for money under the pretext we were buying a house together.
  • Perhaps I was supposed to think that.
  • Totally bogus to leave that conversation to the last minute.
  • It sounded like she was saying no anyway.

Beate came before

  • Ray had an ex girlfriend Beate, a German woman who worked at the call centre they all worked at in Archway, and she had also visited Ray’s parents.

Rhea too

  • He had a close friend who also worked at the call centre, Rhea.
  • I think she had an invite up to Smethwick one time as well.

The male stripper and Worboys

  • Ray was living with Sarah, my friend I went to India with, in Finchley Central, about a year later.
  • They went out and called and asked me to go out with them for a drink in Muswell Hill.
  • So I did.
  • We’re at the Swiss tavern and Ray suggests we go over the road to the nightclub.
  • We’re all a bit pissed by then so we go over.
  • There’s a male stripper at the club full of women.
  • It’s really gross.
  • It turns out Ray knows the stripper and the man asks him to come back to his for a drink.
  • So Ray says let’s all go and me and Sarah and Ray get in the back of this man’s car after the show and he’s got a mate with him in the front, who says he also is a stripper, and I think this man is Worboys, the prolific rapist who also knows Ray pretty well by the way they’re chatting.
  • And suddenly Sarah is non-responsive and I’m talking to her and she’s not replying and I ask Ray what’s happened to Sarah, and that’s all I remember.
  • The car was nearly at the bottom of the hill at that point.
  • Makes me feel very nauseated.

Queen’s Avenue and the caretaker

  • Ray lived in Queen’s Avenue (36?) and the caretaker may well have been the same man that caretook the flat in Hastings for me and Brian in 2001.
  • It seemed like he knew no-one while I was there a lot, and then after I stopped going round, I went round one evening and everyone knew everyone, doors opened, like they were all family.
  • Were they sedating and raping women there constantly?

Mr Siniestra

  • Ray’s neighbor he pretended to have just met.
  • He had that gypsy look like the man who nearly had his hand in my bag that Christmas, and like Hala and the rest of them, even Ugly could be a relation here.

Ray meets my dad at the front door of 31

  • Ray and I were working at the same company Newcrest in Finchley Central in 1996.
  • He walked from the house in Queen’s Avenue Muswell Hill to my house and knocked for me and we walked together to work.
  • One morning, my dad answers the door to him.
  • My dad becomes extraordinarily emotional and enraged when he sees Ray.
  • I notice that when Ray sees dad he sort of makes a weird face, like a seductive pout.
  • Dad totally loses his cool.
  • I can’t remember the details but it was something like he got so angry he said: don’t bring him around here, and I thought it was maybe because Ray had been a bit camp at the door, but dad knows lots of gay men.
  • It didn’t make sense and I was furious at my dad for being so rude to one of my friends.
  • So I’m thinking today massive old-boy and younger generation rape networks countrywide with members from all walks of life including police, etc. And the house in Queen’s Ave was one of their meetup places. And I have to wonder if my dad, then, organized my experiences in 1989.
  • Imagine networks like that suddenly getting tech savvy and having a really good go at ending the world.

The everlasting light

  • Ray drank a lot too.
  • One night after we had split up but we were still friends, he was on his way home from Finchley Central to Muswell Hill walking through Long Lane.
  • There were building works at the North Circular bridge and Ray decided to steal a workman’s flashing light and bring it to me.
  • He said it was the everlasting light, and it was mine, he had to bring it to me.
  • He kept saying; the everlasting light.
  • I’m sure he’ll remember that.
  • He was very drunk, but I thought it was lovely - a bit strange, and criminal, but lovely still.

New Years Eve with Emet and his girlfriend

  • Emet was someone Ray worked with at the call centre.
  • We went to a squat party in Kentish Town and went back to hers after.
  • She lived in a little council flat in Kings Cross.
  • She looked a bit like Mrs Torrence.
  • She didn’t have a spare room for guests, we had to sleep on the floor.

The punk piercing woman

  • Ray seemed to be homeless a lot.
  • One time, he was staying in this woman’s front room in Hornsey.
  • It was actually a flat above where the Rape Crisis Centre is now… or near there in a similar set up - same side of the road, flats on the 1st floor above shops.
  • This woman, Ray told me, was into some strange sexual stuff with piercings and something that made a really loud noise like a nail gun on a regular basis coming from her room.
  • She was super punk and had bright pink hair I think, a lot of it shaved off.
  • I stayed with him there one night again in the front room which she didn’t use at all. It was very bare with no personal belongings in it, not even his.
  • I guess it’s likely she was a hooker.
  • Ray was describing what she was doing as kind of hobby.

What Byron used to say about Ray

  • Byron Vose, an ex-boyfriend, after having met Ray probably in 1997 sometime used to say about him: he’s a really bad boy, and we just thought Byron was throwing words into the air.
  • Not so anymore.
  • Do all men share the worst about themselves, knowing no-one will ever tell the women?

Something frightens Ray Archer off to New Zealand

  • I wonder what.
  • Was he warned off once the money was common knowledge?
  • Was he getting in the way of the main porn gangs who didn’t like a shitty little DIY-er hanging around their favorite target.
  • I remember seeing him once he’d got his mits into the New Zealander lady and he could have been scared.

Ray’s sister

  • Ray’s sister doesn’t talk to her parents.
  • She left the family with the cousin, who she married.
  • The maddest thing EVER was that in May 2002, in Hastings, when Brian and I go out the one time to Hastings pier which has a nightclub, they’re doing security at the gate.
  • What are the chances?