Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  Laboriously I turned myself around on the driver’s seat, until my legs rested gently on the ground outside the car. My keys swayed slightly as they dangled from the ignition.

  I turned them experimentally – I wanted to switch the headlights on. Nothing happened except for a pathetic coughing noise – the battery was dead. I had left the lights on while I was out cold. I swore gently under my breath, trying again, and then again.

  I was wasting my time.

  My mobile lay in the passenger footwell, and I let out a little gasp of happiness. I reached down to pick it up and hit the Wake button. Nothing happened. The battery was dead.

  I turned it over in my hand, trying to think despite my muzzy head. It had been charged this morning. I must have been talking to someone to wear out the battery like that, though there was no way, at the moment, to find out who.

  Damn it.

  Shooting pains went up through my legs as I climbed out of the car, until finally I was upright.

  I was suddenly dizzy. I grabbed at the car for support and pushed my hair out of my face. My forehead felt on fire.

  I looked around. I tried to understand where I was. Next to the building was a dirty yard full of disused machinery, which stopped abruptly at a hedge. After the hedge there was nothing but gently rolling silver streaked fields.

  I needed help. And to call for help, I needed to be able to tell them where I was.

  Walking was just as harrowing as standing up, maybe a shade worse. I was breathing too quickly.

  I glanced back at my little car, huddled close to the iron shutters. I looked out over the fields, and examined the back of a huge noticeboard, erected next to a gap in the hedge that issued out into a small lane.

  I had never seen this place before in my life.

  I plodded up to the board, my breath curling foggily before my face. As I suspected, I was in the yard of some kind of plant or industrial site. The board said that the place was called Farrell’s Distribution Ltd. I blinked at it, uncomprehendingly.

  According to the board, Farrell’s Distribution Ltd was located in Rainham, Essex. I didn’t recognize the telephone code.

  There were no houses nearby, just the warehouse, the yard and then fields. If I could make the car start, there would probably be a farm eventually, or a village. As it was, I was stranded.

  How had I got here?

  Well, I said to myself, I must have driven here in the car. But why here? The last thing I remembered was wanting to drive to a hospital . . . I touched the noticeboard tentatively, to make sure it was real. The wood was freezing beneath the tips of my numb and bloodless fingers.

  The moon was round and fat, bloated with white light, as it sailed amongst the needlepoints of stars. I had the feeling I was falling, even though I was standing upright. The winter air coldly searched my wound, knifing into its unhealthy, unhealing heat.

  As I returned to the yard, I noticed that the trucks were gently rusting, their body parts removed by long-gone scavengers – I had driven into a graveyard of sorts. Perhaps this was a scrapyard. I couldn’t imagine what Farrell’s Distribution distributed, and I didn’t much care right then. My shoulder was pure agony, and my vision was blurring and warping.

  I picked up my dead mobile and sighed. I could have charged it from the car, except, of course, the car wouldn’t start.

  I drifted painfully off to circumnavigate the place, hoping to discover something useful, and almost immediately I was rewarded. Next to the big shutters, hidden by a corner of the warehouse, was a little brick extension, and a window with a Venetian blind pulled shut – it must be the office.

  I would try its door and see if there was a telephone. I wouldn’t be able to walk far in my current condition.

  And, I thought with a sudden flicker of cunning, if I broke in, I would be able to trigger the alarm. I could see it, a tiny blue firefly of light flickering in the eaves of the flat steel roof. The security company would come, or even better the police, and however awkward the conversation would be initially, it was better than bleeding to death or dying of exposure amongst the rusting hulks in the fields.

  Breaking the glass with a piece of broken steel produced no sound other than the terrifyingly loud crash of the thick pane. Perhaps it was a silent alarm.

  I cleared the sill and awkwardly straddled it, climbing into the dark space. There was a chair and a light switch. I clicked it. There was a tinkling hum and then the strip light came on. I sighed in relief.

  I put my hand up to cover my eyes from the intrusive, shocking glare. I sat down in the chair, thick with black dust that had been deeply ingrained by a succession of overall-clad bottoms. An ancient desktop computer, its casing yellowed and smudged, faced me. The office was still used for something, but I couldn’t think what. There was a pale Bakelite telephone on the desk, covered with black smudges. I picked it up and, amazingly, a clear, loud purring issued from it.

  There was a dirty pad of paper, of a light green colour with the letter heading ‘Farrell’s Distribution Ltd’ on it, with the address and phone number of the place. It was sticking out from beneath a pile of well-thumbed soft-core magazines for men. Semi-naked women smiled at me in encouragement. I pulled the pad out and studied the address.

  My fingers negotiated the stiff and heavy keypad of the telephone with difficulty. I tried Eddy’s work, even though I knew it was shut. The phone rang. And rang. I listened dully to it. After several minutes, it became slowly apparent that I was wasting my time. When nobody answered, as I’d known they wouldn’t, I still managed to be disappointed. I tried to remember Lily’s number, but couldn’t. Or didn’t want to.

  I had the absurd fear that I’d died, and that this was my Hell – to spend forever in a juggernauts’ graveyard, phoning people who never answered, under the unforgiving glare of a fluorescent strip light that made my puffy white hands and arms look like marbled meat. I shook my head, but only succeeded in making my shoulder twang painfully.

  I leaned my throbbing head on the back of my hand. I should call the police. I should pick up the phone and dial 999 and tell some stolid citizen in a dark blue uniform exactly what had happened to me. But in my weak and fevered condition the prospect horrified me. I felt the same way about the hospital. The thought of strange hands touching me, and unknown faces leaning over me, questioning me, challenging me, a myriad of voices buzzing in my ears like a nest of wasps . . . The idea repulsed me.

  Of course, this was stupid. My home had been ransacked, I had been attacked and nearly killed. I lifted the receiver again.

  I replaced it. I did not want to entrust myself to the police. It had never worked before. I remembered Lily saying, ‘But he doesn’t know all about you, does he?’ in that horrid, insinuating tone, during our argument, that smug tone that undermined my reality regardless of the facts. The police would do the same . . .

  Well, I thought, some kind of resolve thickening around my dreamy head, they can try. My house has been broken into and I’m injured, I’m cut, and it’s swollen and hot in my shoulder and it’s making me giddy and I’ve got to call somebody.

  But in a minute.

  I rested, to muster my courage and word my explanations, which was proving difficult. My head swam deliriously, and just then, one last sharp idea shot through it, like a little silver fish through a thick sea.

  ‘What city?’ said the bored voice of the operator.

  My mouth, when I opened it, was as dry as dust.

  ‘Cambridge.’

  ‘What’s the name?’ Her voice was flat and contemptuous. She thought I was drunk, most likely.

  ‘Martin Forrester,’ I said, then tacking on needlessly. ‘It might be Dr Forrester.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. That in all of my terrors, borne of fatigue, pain and loneliness, the only human company that I could lay claim to was a woman who despised me sight unseen made me want to weep.

  I think, as I phased in and out of consciousness at this point, that I must actually
have cried, because I remember that her voice became somewhat softer as she gave me the number. I wrote it down on the pad with a well-chewed pencil. My hand was feather light.

  He was in.

  My head felt on fire, the four walls seemed to buckle around me. The tape on my bandages cut into me like a vice, the thin shirt I wore seemed like a tent designed purely to keep heat all over me. Heat, heat, too much of it altogether and it was everywhere. The sheet was soaked. I looked at the floor, with its unfamiliar carpet. The floor would be cooler. I tried to get out of the bed but it was just too much work. Gravity itself had changed, and a pillow weighed a ton, a sheet a thousand tons, a blanket a million tons. My shoulder throbbed ceaselessly. I wanted to cut it off and be rid of it, for good.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them Bethan Avery was there, which seemed perfectly natural. She was dressed in a little hooded Parka and a short tartan skirt over black cotton tights. She obviously wanted to continue the conversation we’d been having while I’d been waiting for Martin to pick me up.

  ‘When will you see me?’ she asked with exasperation. I thought she was being a bit pre-emptory, since she was already here.

  ‘Oh, soon, soon.’ Speech was an effort. The ghastly heat had filled my mouth and dried it all up. ‘Soon, darling.’

  ‘Margot, you can’t lie about in bed all the time.’

  ‘I know, I know . . .’

  ‘He’ll come to get me soon. We have to do something or I’ll die, Margot, we—’

  ‘I know!’ I shouted.

  Her face softened. I wanted to cradle her in my arms, her bottom lip seemed so tender, her eyes so large and dark. But I couldn’t raise my arms just then so she remained remote and hazy.

  I thought she was about to leave. I couldn’t have borne the heat and timelessness alone so I reached out a supplicating hand, which rose for a moment and then fell weakly to the bed.

  ‘I’ll get you, Bethan. I promise. I’ll take you home.’

  ‘Home,’ she said, considering the word.

  ‘It’ll all be all right.’

  ‘It’ll never be all right.’ She rubbed the side of her face thoughtfully. ‘I can never go home. But I know what I want. I want a future. Bring me a future. Do that and I’ll let you go.’

  ‘What kind of future?’ I asked dreamily, not really following her.

  ‘Any future will do.’

  I sighed and shut my eyes, and Martin was there, with a couple of pills and a glass of water. He looked exhausted, and there were tiny tight lines around his eyes.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked, pushing at his hand, which was gently offering the pills. ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘There’s no one here, Margot. Open wide and stop scaring me.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, still weakly resisting his warm arm. ‘Didn’t you hear us?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ he said. ‘Take these. You’ll feel better.’

  ‘I don’t like pills.’

  ‘They’re only painkillers.’

  ‘They keep telling me to take pills. Everything will be fine if I take the pills. Well I prefer things not to be fine. I prefer them to be real. I won’t take any fucking pills.’

  ‘You took them before. And see, you’re better already. You know who I am, that’s a start. Just take them. They’re nothing sinister.’

  I wavered. ‘All right.’

  I opened my mouth and he poked them in. They stuck to my dry tongue. He held the glass gently up to my lips and I took a few weak sips of water.

  He tried to take the glass away but the water turned to nectar in my mouth. He patiently held it still while I drained it very slowly.

  ‘Want some more?’

  I nodded. My head felt heavy on my neck.

  He left me and I could hear a tap being turned. He came back with a full glass. I drank greedily.

  ‘D’you know where you are?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘No. But I think this must be your house, so we’re in Cambridge, right?’

  ‘You are a lot better. Do you remember getting here?’

  I sighed, suddenly exhausted again. ‘No. Wait. Yes. There was a hospital, and a doctor who said he was from Tobago. And policemen came.’

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. He took the glass away. ‘No more for a few minutes. No need to overdo it.’

  I thought for a moment. The mist seemed to be clearing. God, thought a nonsensical part of my head, that stuff’s hot shit.

  ‘So, how did I get here?’

  ‘The police picked you up from the warehouse, remember?’ He looked very kind in the dim light, his long hair loose around his face. ‘They took you to the hospital in London.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that part.’ At least, I didn’t remember anything that I hadn’t just imagined. ‘What was I saying to you?’

  ‘Nothing that made much sense. I thought you were dying. I was trying to get you to phone the police and you were getting hysterical.’ He shrugged. ‘So I ratted you out to the ambulance service. Sorry. Then I thought, she sounds terrified, I’d better go up there and see her.’

  I frowned. ‘You drove all the way to London?’

  ‘No, not London. Essex. Well, what else was I supposed to do? Just hang up on you? I thought you were going to die on me just when our acquaintance was becoming interesting . . .’ He pondered the empty glass in his hand. ‘Fortunately, it’s not that bad . . . your shoulder, that is. It’s just a cut, not too deep. It needed a few stitches.’ That intense green gaze turned on me. ‘They say that the reason you, um, are feeling a little strange right now is that you’ve discontinued your medication.’

  I lay back and sighed. ‘I know.’ To be honest, I’d suspected a chemical cause to my swinging bolts between optimism and despair in the days following the broadcast. I just hadn’t wanted to own up to it.

  Though now, here in this quiet house with this man, the prospect of admitting it did not appal or terrify me as much as it had.

  ‘It’ll wear off, they say.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You didn’t want to go back home or contact your husband, and I couldn’t really blame you under the circumstances, so I brought you back here.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  He set the glass on the floor and smiled. ‘That’s not what you were saying before.’

  I grinned sleepily to myself, and licked my lips. ‘Sorry. How do you feel about being alone in a room with a dangerous lunatic?’

  ‘Pretty relaxed.’ He pulled the sheet I’d kicked off back over my legs. ‘Rest.’

  I shut my eyes. ‘OK. And Martin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks for coming for me.’

  He smiled and opened his mouth, as though about to add something, but instead he simply shook his head. ‘Good night, Margot.’

  I was terribly tired and hot, but I was still curious. I kicked the sheet off when I saw he was gone, and lay back, thinking furiously. But all my thoughts were muddled and strange with painkillers, and after a few minutes I was asleep.

  I was following Bethan Avery through the corridor in Addenbrooke’s, and on all sides the film crew were packing away their equipment, chatting to one another. Martin was deep in conversation with Thea, the actress who had played Bethan, and she was flirting back at him, with her tinkly little laugh.

  Bethan walked quickly, stumbling a little, looking neither right nor left, the hood on her parka drawn up to cover her dark hair.

  I wanted to shout out to someone: ‘Stop her, stop her, that’s her!’ but my mouth was sealed and I could make no sound at all. I could only run after her, unable to call her name.

  And though she was only walking while I was running, I couldn’t catch up with her, no matter how hard I tried to make up the distance, my feet heavy and slow over the hospital’s tiled floor. She remained just thirty feet ahead, as though she was a bright mirage in the desert of my subconscious.

  I was aware of
the walls of Addenbrooke’s growing darker and more narrow, the light increasingly dim and orange, and there was the smell of incense, disinfectant and cigarette ends, switching in and out. Voices came from ahead, from the unknowable distance in front of Bethan, a sort of loud chaotic hubbub echoing against the red bricks, and the gold and scarlet murals painted on the ceiling showed a female saint in a man’s toga.

  I emerged into a richly decorated space filled with dark wooden pews, and the stained-glass window with its image of St Eugenia, the woman in disguise, let variegated light fall on to all present.

  I lingered at the back, unsure of how to proceed. Someone in priest’s vestments was at the altar, but I didn’t want to look up, to meet their gaze. I understood that it was vitally important that he didn’t see me.

  The candles flickered all around and the organ began to play as I stared about myself, utterly lost. Bethan appeared to have vanished. The congregation all seemed a little familiar, and I felt that something was insisting that I look at them, notice them too, but then I saw the back of Bethan’s hood, from where she slouched in the front pew, her legs crossed lazily before her and poking sideways into the aisle, her toes in their black Mary Janes flexed skywards.

  I hurried up the aisle to the nave, my chin pressed to my chest, careful not to look up and attract the notice of whatever creature was officiating. I pushed myself in almost roughly next to Bethan, determined to get her to come with me away from all of this danger, or at the very least to adopt a more respectful posture in church.

  I seized her elbow, and she turned to meet my gaze almost lazily, her hood falling back to reveal her peroxide white hair.

  ‘Heya, Amy,’ she said, and her eyes were glazed and dead. ‘Want to come to a party?’

  I found my voice and I screamed, screamed so loudly that the congregation grew still and everything was silent, except for the ringing, deliberate footfalls of someone stepping down from the altar and slowly coming for us both.