Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘Margot?’

  Martin’s expression had changed. Something was wrong.

  I was shaking. I was shaking so hard that the very floor was vibrating beneath my chair, and I was astonished that they could not feel it.

  ‘I can’t . . . I thought you meant pills.’

  Greta glared at me, as though I were talking in some incomprehensible language. ‘What possible difference does it make?’ she snapped.

  ‘I . . . I can’t have needles injected into me.’ I felt frozen with horror. ‘I hate needles. It’s a gigantic problem at all the hospitals when they try to treat me. I just can’t do it.’

  Martin blinked at me. ‘But that’s . . . Margot, you told me that when you were on the streets you were an injecting heroin addict.’

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to reply. There was nothing inside me but a dumbstruck amazement, a confusion, but something . . . something was becoming suddenly very clear.

  ‘Except that . . . that you weren’t, were you?’ he asked.

  At that moment, I finally got it.

  I had tried to comply, to take that leap of faith, but I had been resisting. I had not believed. Yes, my past was a muddy patchwork of experiences, frequently misremembered and often poorly understood, but still, you could say that about a lot of people’s lives.

  The woman in Wastenley this morning may or may not have been my mother, and after so long doing without her did it really matter? Did she disown me because she was angry with me, with my sudden appearance, the way I bellowed at her like a crazy person, yet another victim of that fathomless rage that keeps looming like a shark’s fin out of the dark waters of my subconscious; an emotion I can neither enjoy nor control?

  Or did she really just not know me?

  I was quite sure I didn’t know her. But that was not true. I remembered . . . I remembered knowing about her. More to the point, I knew about her husband.

  I remembered sitting on a street sign this morning, but does it follow that it was that particular one, on that particular street? Did I just want to make Martin happy, so my hungry, needy mind sought out this tiny detail – after all, I already knew that Bethan Avery had lived there – it would stand to reason that she would know this street corner.

  But Martin didn’t ask me to sit on the sign.

  I had learned not to ask questions, to live in the moment, and I’d been doing it all of my life.

  I thought I did it rather well. I fooled everyone, but most especially, it turns out, I had fooled myself. My life wasn’t a mosaic of dim memories, it had been invented out of whole cloth. It was all lies, lies which I cleaved to despite the fact that they hurt me, cost me my peace, could have cost me my job, could have cost me my life, if last night was anything to go by.

  It was all just lies.

  And the only thing to replace them with was unimaginable horror.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was plunging for the door.

  Martin found me outside, standing on the steps under the awning, watching the snow fall. He didn’t say anything, but came and stood next to me, watching the snow with me for a little while.

  As far as I was capable of feeling anything, I felt grateful for this. I wanted him to put his arm around me, knew that he would not, because if it had been an unwelcome gesture it would have been an unconscionable thing to do to me at that particular moment.

  Perhaps I needed to put my arm around him.

  ‘Margot . . . about . . .’

  ‘I have an idea.’

  He did not reply, waiting.

  ‘I need some cigarettes,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t. Or rather, I don’t any more. I gave up.’

  Beside me, I could feel him wanting to object.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘Trust me as I trusted you. Come with me while I smoke a cigarette.’

  We crossed the road to the little Co-Op opposite, and queued patiently at the counter while a man in front of us quibbled with the shop assistant over which scratch card he wanted.

  Bloody hell, it was practically a tenner for a pack of twenty Silk Cut Blue nowadays. It only seemed like a couple of years since I gave up, and it was a fiver then. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

  You could have knocked me over with a feather anyway.

  I bought them and a pink plastic Bic lighter, which the boy behind the counter obligingly flicked into a flame a couple of times, just to check that it worked.

  Martin observed all of this, and me, with an aura of bemused indulgence.

  ‘What’s this about?’ he asked, as we emerged back on to Parker’s Piece in the snow. It was growing, if not exactly dark, then dim.

  I hadn’t forgotten that we were on a clock. Far from it.

  ‘It’s about drugs. And memory,’ I said. ‘Sit on the bench with me.’

  We settled on the bench opposite the fire station, with its new gleaming frontage. Behind the glass panels the engines were vast and quiescent.

  I unwrapped the cellophane from the packet, willing myself to remember this action – I must have done this hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of my life.

  ‘Am I interrupting something if I ask questions?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t make a difference. It’s beyond words.’ I thumbed open the top of the box, regarded the tesseract of packed filters within for a long moment. At one point this sight filled me with equal parts desire, self-contempt, resignation – or even nothing at all, something I did without thinking.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The minute you said it, I knew I could never have been a heroin addict. The thought of applying a needle to my own flesh makes my skin crawl. The thought of loss of control terrifies me. It had just never occurred to me before, because of course, I’d never had to think of it that way. I could remember how to do it, but I didn’t long for it. It was just a fact, one I assumed was true.

  ‘If I was truly addicted, I would have got past it. But no. There wasn’t even the residue of desire. Now these,’ I shook the box at him. ‘Holding these, looking at these, smelling that herby scent, that . . . that male scent – grassy, slightly bitter yet very rich – these hold the residue of desire for me.’ I lifted them to my nose and inhaled.

  He was silent, listening.

  ‘Our minds are tricksy,’ I said, gazing down at the box. ‘But our senses . . . our senses have memories, too, and they’re harder to fool.’ I pushed one of the cigarettes upwards, drew it out, put it between my lips. They pursed around it, adopting the correct shape, as if they’d been waiting to do this for years.

  I was right, I knew it.

  I lifted the lighter, ignited, inhaled.

  It tasted horrible. But that was OK. I expected that. It tasted like a welcome from people that haven’t recognized you yet, but will soon, and will be overjoyed when they do.

  The smell of burning was like a little hearth, warming me. I blew out a puff of smoke into the cold air.

  Martin’s intense gaze followed it.

  ‘I know everything there is to know about how to shoot up heroin,’ I said. ‘I know to crush the pills. How to cook the mixture, how to draw up the solution through cotton wool so the bits don’t get sucked up into the needle. I know everything there is to know about it, because I watched Angelique do it.’

  I inhaled again, the burning, sweet heat of it. It still tasted disgusting. But I had no desire to stop.

  ‘Angelique’s dad . . . well, it wasn’t sexual abuse, the way she told it, but there was a sexual component, or maybe that’s not right.’ I shook my hand, as though to conjure the right phrase, and it seemed to work: ‘There was a control component. He made her get up at six every morning and inspected her. I mean, he watched her shower, and brush her teeth, and get dressed, until she was about fifteen years old. She kept a diary, which had to be submitted to him every week for his approval. She was allowed no friends that he didn’t vet, and he didn’t rubb
er-stamp any of them. They were all dirty, or sly, or ignorant, or rebellious. Basically, he had no chance of controlling them, so out they went.

  ‘And Angelique went along with all of it, until she was fifteen. Then she met a boy on the way home from school, who offered her a lift in his car. By the end of the week, she’d run away with him. To London. Where I met her.’ I let out a sad little laugh. ‘Isn’t that what everyone does, at least once in their lives? I did it, Bethan’s mother – my mother – did it, and Angelique did it. She ran away to the big city.’

  The glowing tip of the cigarette jutted out from between my ring and index finger on the right hand, as though it had never been away.

  ‘I’d like to say she was happy ever after.’ The smoke curled out of my mouth. ‘But I’m quite sure that she wasn’t.’ I let my forehead sink down on to my hand. ‘I know that she wasn’t.’

  He waited. The snow had stopped for a little while, but was now whirling downwards again.

  I sighed.

  ‘Somehow, I became Angelique,’ I said. The words sat on the still air, in a little cloud of their own craziness. ‘I can’t tell which parts of me I’ve stolen from her, like the heroin, or which are really me, like the cigarettes.’

  ‘It will be all right,’ he said, putting a hand on my trembling arm.

  I cast about me. The sun had set and the stream of passers-by was drying to a trickle. The streetlights had started to glimmer redundantly in the gloom.

  I touched my hair and snow came away in my hands. I didn’t feel cold though.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s about triggers. My mind doesn’t remember, but my senses can feel the way, if I let them. I need to get up close and personal with more triggers. But first, we need to make that crew in there do that DNA. And the hypnosis. Now.’

  ‘You’re freezing,’ he said after a minute. ‘And we do need to go back. We can’t sit here all night.’

  ‘Another minute,’ I said.

  ‘Let me get you your coat, then. It’s only in the car.’

  I nodded, these arrangements passing me by, like a dream.

  I watched Martin walk up to the Land Rover, watched his feet plodding through the slush. He moved aside for a man passing along the inside of the pavement.

  The cigarette had burned away practically to the filter. I dropped it, ground it into the snow.

  Then something thudded into my head. I could feel my consciousness tremble and ripple, and Martin’s receding back vanished into a mist of grey. I dropped like a stone through the ripples, into nothingness.

  It didn’t hurt at all.

  27

  There was something vibrating against my head.

  My chin was settled into my chest, and my back ached, especially my neck. The vibration was quick and low, the throb of an engine. Through my half-closed eyes I could see the strands of my hair, falling against my face. My head was muzzy with pain, and each time the little muscles in my face moved it hurt.

  I remembered that I was in danger.

  I shut my eyes quickly.

  I was lying in a moving car, jammed in the gap between the front seats and the back. My shoulders were against the door, my head sunk into my bosom. My hands were tied behind me, and full of furious pins and needles. The car’s interior smelled musty, full of mould, and the seats were stained with it.

  I started to wriggle my wrists carefully against my bonds, desperate not to signal that I was awake.

  On my side was a wall of vinyl that was the driver’s seat, or rather the back of it. Warm air blew at me from the gap beneath it. I saw all I could without moving my head, or any part of my body. My limbs lay loose, as carelessly as they had when I’d been thrown there, but they were full of secret tension, and I was in terror lest someone should accidentally kick or touch me, and it would be discovered.

  There is a state of mind where one ceases to question the whys and wherefores of life, a state where all that can be done is to exist, from minute to minute, with only the physical world and the promptings of millennia-old instincts as guides. This was my state, in which one second followed another and preceded the next, and I thought of and saw nothing but the wall of black vinyl, hearing the growl of the engine and the roaring wind buffet the door.

  I fought to lay still and relax, and picked at the tight little nylon knots in my bonds, as I was carried forth into the centre of the labyrinth for the final time.

  My neck was aching. I could not take it much longer, I would have to shift position. Whoever was driving would notice me, notice I was awake. As tortures go, it was an elegant device, scrupulously executed.

  ‘Still fucking snowing,’ said the driver. I froze, but there was something distracted but comfortable in his tone, as though he was someone that spoke to himself more often than others. He had a soft, low voice, which startled me. My hand might have twitched.

  My cut shoulder itched abominably.

  We were travelling at speed, and it was snowing. Dusk was settling, but there were no streetlights. I had to get out of the car. I had to escape. And when I thought of the word ‘escape’, a wild, fierce longing broke out in me; a bitter hurt. From prison to prison to prison, from cellar to refuge to office to hall of residence – from drugs to sex to marriage to work – an endless cycle of escapes, like a rat in a laboratory maze, or the flight of a magpie from grass to hedgerow to rusted railing.

  A twenty-year fox hunt, pursued by hounds both real and imaginary.

  Hounds . . .

  . . . And the magpie.

  It alighted in my head again. I could see it rise, its tail spined out against the English sky. Rain had been falling. It had hit my face in little splashes, cool and refreshing after . . . after what? The rain. The rain had always been there.

  My skin remembered the rain, even if I did not.

  Back in the car I felt the driver shift against the cheap upholstery.

  Like an answered prayer, the knot I was gingerly picking at unravelled beneath the pincers of my nails. The twine slackened and fell off one wrist.

  Long nails are always a good thing on a woman. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

  Now, I have choices.

  I could try to overpower the driver, whoever he is (oh don’t be stupid, you know who he is. He’s Bethan’s – your – abductor, the one who has Katie) or attract the attention of passers-by. But he’s driving at speed and is likely armed, and the dim dusky sky I can see through the opposite passenger window whenever I dare to raise my eyes, which is just showing a few peeping stars, does not inspire confidence. I am not sure we have passed another car the whole time I have been awake.

  The third choice is to flee, which presents its own problems.

  There is only one way out of a car: through the door. I concentrated my already condensed attention on the hard thrumming I was leaning up against. I would have to open the door and jump. At this angle I would be 90 per cent sure of landing headfirst, then my body would somersault over it – my neck would almost certainly break, if the car was moving at any kind of speed.

  This horrific option, however, was the only one I could think of.

  My hands lay under me, and very, very slowly I started to move them apart, to my sides.

  Through the door at my back I felt the intense chill of the wind, pregnant with snow and the slush driven up by the wheels. A strand of my own hair tickled my cheek, exquisitely.

  There was the musical tick-tock of the indicators, and the car engine idled down a few octaves. He was going to turn. I might have tensed imperceptibly, as a voice spoke softly into my ear, It must be now.

  Now it would be.

  No jerky movements.

  My right hand was retreating up the length of my body.

  The car was slowing, slowing to turn.

  I had my instant – it was upon me. Act now or for ever hold your peace.

  I threw myself over, belly down now, and seized the door handle. I had not even depressed it before there was a sudden
panicked braking, a shout of, ‘Oh no you fucking don’t!’

  His rage was paralysing, molten, and I was filled to the brim with a scrabbling animal terror, as though my senses remembered this too. Anything would be better than being in the car with him. Anything.

  The handle clunked down, metal grinding against metal, and I pushed, though my instincts screamed against it.

  I kicked wildly, my face full of the freezing wind gushing through the crack in the car door. The snow was deep and still flying away from me at a perilous speed, which was growing greater. The driver was speeding the car up.

  I kicked free.

  There was a long, flying moment, when everything was suspended, as though the turning world itself had hit some impossible impediment. There was neither sound nor sensation, just whiteness, and the flight of fate out of my hands.

  Wheels rushed by, inches from my head. I waited for death or mutilation, as I crunched back into time, cushioned and jarred by the thick snow.

  But when I raised my bruised head, one side of my face stinging with the force of a hundred needles, the car was just a black blur, swinging round in the snow, sending a white wave over its bonnet, which thudded on to the metal like a tiny avalanche, glittering in the headlights.

  I got up, staggering slightly. The car, some hundred yards down the road, was growing closer, nearer through the darkness and the veil of snow.

  There were trees, iced in white, near the road. A tiny stand of woodland, an oasis of Fenland, stretching out under the sunless sky. I ran into them, as though pursued by wolves.

  It had stopped snowing, but that was no help.

  I had run and run for miles it seemed, through black trees sticking up like spikes through the white carpet, and then scrambled down into the narrow crack of one of the ditches lining a small lane, aware that on the flat Fens I would be visible for miles, even in the dark, and that the snow would hold on to my footprints. I was soaked to the bone, burning hot, scalding the snow into water that dripped over my skin and sifted through my clothing.

  I paused. There was something like ground glass in my lungs, cutting me with each breath I took. The lane next to the ditch had come to a crossroads, both literal and otherwise.