Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘I see what you did there. Very droll.’

  She mimed a crash of cymbals, and I laughed out loud for the first time since I’d arrived.

  ‘There’s a third alternative,’ murmured Martin into my hair.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You could choose a new name. People do in these situations.’

  I fell silent. This had occurred to me before.

  ‘A new name.’ I relaxed into his shifting grip. I didn’t say my primary thought out loud – but it feels like more running. ‘What would it be?’

  ‘Anything you like. Jane Smith. Princess Cuddlybottom. Spot . . .’

  ‘Spot?!’ I slapped at his hand.

  ‘Desperate Davinia, the Most Wanted Woman in East Anglia . . .’

  ‘Now you’re talking . . .’

  ‘Keith Bloggs. HMS Pinafore. Knickerbocker Glory. The Big Easy . . .’

  I laughed, smothering it against his chest. ‘The sky’s the limit, I suppose.’

  ‘I think you would have trouble fitting that on a credit card, but yeah, it could work.’

  I sighed happily.

  From then on, in private, he refers to me as Ms Limit.

  Katie tries to sit up, perhaps moved by my sombre mood, and I can see her wince. This has been her third, and hopefully last, bout of surgery.

  ‘How did the birthday go?’

  ‘It was all right,’ she says. She looks down at the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your divorce.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Are you . . . OK?’ Her dark eyes are guarded, will probably always be guarded now, but there is that flicker of kindness in them.

  ‘Yes. He’s a wanker, so I’m better off not married to him.’

  She nods, relieved. This is also her opinion.

  Ours is a deeply strange relationship. Margot, or more properly Mrs Lewis, was her teacher, the authority figure. Bethan is her comrade-in-arms, the only other person in the world who knows what it was like, who survived the cellar. But Bethan is fractured and frequently missing. For all her youth, Katie has more mental strength than Bethan ever did. In that sense, she leads me, and not the other way around.

  And in leading me, she leads herself.

  ‘It was dreadful, what he did to you. Saying all that stuff to the papers . . .’

  I shrug. ‘You know, it doesn’t make him less of an arse, but in a way I’m glad.’

  She looks sharply at me, her smooth brow bent into a slight frown.

  ‘It was exhausting, living a lie, never trusting anyone, always terrified I’d be discovered. And it gave me excuses – reasons to not examine why I didn’t have a normal, joined-up life, why I never stayed in touch with anyone. I always knew something was very, very wrong with me, I just never dared look too closely at why.’ I sigh. ‘This way I’m forced to confront who I was. What I did to the real Margot.’

  She visibly double-takes. ‘There was a real Margot? I don’t understand. I thought it was a name you made up.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t make her up.’

  My psychiatrist is a clean-cut thirty-something called Yufeng. It was he that I was finally referred to once Katie and I were wheeled out of the Grove in that ambulance, the doctor that Greta was trying to call on that last mad day that I became Bethan Avery again.

  I get the impression he’s quite senior at the hospital, a hotshot with a growing international reputation, and that I’m something of a coup for him. He very kindly, after he was assigned to me, asked me if I would prefer a woman, and I told him no, I was good with this if he was. We get on – I can make him laugh from time to time despite himself – which makes me feel a lot more comfortable.

  Together we embark on the course of drug-induced trances and psychotherapy my recovery requires. He tapes these sessions, and we listen to them together; I hear my own voice in the echoing acoustics of the digital recording, and don’t know it. It is Bethan Avery’s voice.

  I was right to pick him in spite of gender empathy, as it turns out, because though the therapy has been exhausting and turbulent he has proved to be an unshakeable guide.

  I told him that I am not that interested in recovering what happened with Christopher Meeks all those years ago, unless it is of material aid to the on-going police investigation.

  ‘You’re not?’ asks Yufeng, his hands steepled together, his focus in action. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have always been much less interested in Christopher Meeks than he has been in me, and I see no reason for that to change. He’s going to get the full life tariff, isn’t he? I mean, they found those girls buried in the garden. He’s never coming out, right?’

  ‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Yufeng.

  I offered him a little twist of a smile. ‘Well, then.’

  ‘You don’t want to know why he did those things? You’re not curious?’

  My eyes narrowed, and I could almost feel him retreat, as though he had taken a psychic step backward. The shadow of my old rage lay over me.

  But just for a moment. Then it was gone, like clouds passing over the face of the sun.

  ‘Yufeng,’ I said. ‘I already know everything about him that I’ll ever need. What I want to know now is, how did I become Margot?’

  Some things I do not yet remember, and I have to take on faith. I remember escaping the Grove now, but very little else has come back spontaneously or even under hypnosis, and I have been told to expect that most of it may never.

  They found evidence that I tried to make a reverse charge call to my grandmother’s house, and the new tenants – I’d been gone for two months by this time – told me she was dead. I do not recall this.

  There was a coach journey to London Victoria. I don’t know how I got the clothes or money. I don’t remember losing the nightdress.

  But incredibly enough, there is a record that these things happened.

  It is forty seconds of CCTV footage that has survived by accident – linked to another case.

  It’s Victoria Coach Station in jerky black and white.

  The grainy film shows a young girl, with a slightly halting, stiff gait – perhaps she’s been cramped in the coach, or perhaps she’s recovering from some kind of fight – certainly she’s been injured. She wears a dirty dark hoodie and loose, ill-fitting pants. Despite the cold March evening she is clad in cheap flip-flops. She has no bag. She crosses the empty bus lanes with the other passengers to reach the concourse, where the camera is, in jolting stop-motion, and as she grows nearer my heart starts to hammer.

  The small gaggle of pedestrians slow, as the ones with luggage mount the kerb. At the back, the girl, who has been glancing carefully all around herself, raises her head and spots the camera.

  I stop breathing. I can see the dark eyes, the haunted expression. Though her nose is swollen and misshapen, badly broken, and her bottom lip is dark where it’s been split, I see Bethan Avery. But for the first time, I can also see me inside her.

  On the last night I am out with Angelique, I tell Yufeng in my drug-drenched trance, we are somewhere out in Canary Wharf in the ruins of Docklands. Angelique is looking for this ex of hers who owes her some money. We find him, and some manner of exchange takes place under the pillars of South Quay DLR, the details of which she is very hazy about, but it involves her disappearing and leaving me alone for the best part of two hours, while I hide on a bench, partly concealed from the street by scaffolding. In fact, when she returns she is still very hazy, with that dead-eyed glaze that she wears more and more often.

  I am furious and frightened because we are very likely going to miss the curfew and my bed will be given away for the night. The thought fills me with a thudding dread. What if I never get it back, and am stuck out here for ever with Angelique, in her London full of junkies and squats, unexplained favours and needle marks? This is a very real danger, as because I have no legal ID, the nuns cannot forward me on to social services as is their usual process if you stay longer than ten days. There is the real possibility that
their patience will run out with me, particularly if I am regularly truant from my bed.

  But I cannot tell them that I am Bethan Avery. Not now, not ever.

  We need to get back before curfew, and she is making us late.

  The DLR, however, is shut for repairs. We will have to walk to Canary Wharf proper. The night nips us with cold and we have no coats.

  We are moving past a deserted, boarded-up house when I feel her slow.

  ‘Come on,’ I snap.

  ‘Can’t we stop for a minute?’ Her eyes drift towards the house.

  ‘No! We’re going to lose our beds for the night.’

  ‘Go on, Amy.’ This is what she calls me. It’s the false name I gave at the shelter.

  ‘No,’ I say coldly.

  She doesn’t reply, instead voting with her feet, drifting off towards the semi-boarded door.

  I can’t leave her alone in this condition.

  Oh, fuck it.

  I follow her.

  We pad into the house. It stinks of urine and mould, but at least it’s empty. And so is Angelique, her arms slightly outset at her sides, her fingers gently waving, as though she is swimming through the fetid closeness of the old house.

  I don’t like this. ‘Angelique,’ I say. ‘Why can’t you wait until we get back to Flicks?’

  It’s a rhetorical question, and as I say it I can hear the defeat in my voice. She can’t wait because she can’t wait.

  I try another tack, as I see her plump down on the filthy floor. ‘I am not sitting in here all night.’

  Also doomed, I realize, as she flaps a hand at me. ‘Just a taste. It’s cold out there. Just to get me home.’

  I sigh. ‘Just a taste.’

  I watch her get her kit out – a Hello Kitty pencil case. She has about six disposable lighters in it, only one of which works at any given time. Once she has fixed herself up, she offers some to me, without enthusiasm.

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  Instead, I light one of her cigarettes and sit there fuming silently while her eyes roll back in her head and she makes a little coughing noise. Then she coughs again, more loudly. She slumps sideways on to her side like a wax doll in the process of melting, and I sigh, hard, realizing that I’ll never get her back to Flicks while she’s like this.

  It takes me a little while – until I finish my cigarette – to notice that she’s not breathing any more.

  The ambulance seems to take for ever to come. I phoned it from the telephone box two streets away, and gave what I considered very clear directions to the derelict house, but they still stumble about for another ten minutes before I hear one shouting from within that he’s found her.

  I stand on the corner, with the rest of the street flotsam, watching. My grip on Angelique’s little Hello Kitty bag is so tight my fingers hurt.

  When I understood she was dead, there was a strange moment when I stopped swearing at her and commanding her to breathe. My conscious emotion was a kind of irritated fury, but to my surprise, I then burst into a hot white flood of fat breathless tears, squirting out with the force of bullets. I am, for some time, unable to master myself, even though in the back of my head I can hear a voice like hers screaming, ‘GET UP, GET OUT, THE PLOD WILL COME YOU STUPID COW!’ and I know it’s right, I know it’s true, but I cannot move.

  The telephone box stinks of urine and is dotted with cards for prostitutes. I rub my wet red eyes with a scrap of tissue I find in her bag. The tissue is spotted with tiny drops of her blood.

  I put the tissue back in the bag, and in the bottom I can see the last remaining detritus of her life. A new packet of three condoms, one missing. A half pack of mint Polos. A little bottle of Ysatis. A small roll of banknotes, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds. This astonishes me. I don’t think I’ve ever held this much money at one time before now.

  There are also a few cards in the bottom of the purse – entries into clubs, vouchers for free food at charities. But there is also one – laminated – and I turn it over under the streetlights as the wail of the ambulance dies down, examining it under the hectic red and blue lights.

  It’s a college ID card for West Hyrett School, which I’ve never heard of but is apparently in Essex and ‘Encouraging Excellence’. There’s a passport photo on it of someone it takes me a second to identify – a studious brunette with thick glasses and bright pink lipstick. It’s Angelique, of course, in her previous life, her hair a lacklustre centre parting, but her big eyes and good skin glowing through. I don’t recognize the name beneath the picture. She smiles, that crooked, secretive smile. I can feel the tears – powerful but mysterious – fighting their way back.

  But I remember where I am. I drop the card back into the pencil case, drop it all in her handbag and holster it over my shoulder. The ambulance men have not come out of the house, but the police have arrived. It’s time for me to go. Tilting my head down and away, I head back towards the bright lights of London Bridge and a place to spend the night.

  She didn’t look like a Margot.

  ‘You took her name.’ Katie’s hands are laced together over her bandages as she relaxes back on the bed.

  ‘Yes. I stole it. I stole her life.’

  ‘Stole it?’ Katie considers this. ‘You sound like, I dunno, you feel guilty.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not guilty. She didn’t need it any more. I did. But still.’ I sigh. ‘It wasn’t mine.’

  Katie is silent. She is thinking it; what Martin is thinking, what I am thinking.

  I leave her with a kiss.

  When I get home, I have barely hung my coat up before the doorbell rings behind me.

  It’s Susannah, or more properly Detective Constable Watson, who came to my house after the letters were verified.

  ‘Hiya, Margot.’ She grins at me. I’d seen a lot of both her and Eamonn (her boss) during the trial and we’d all become quite friendly, but that was a couple of months ago.

  ‘Hello,’ I respond, surprised. ‘Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Thanks, but no, I can’t this time. I’m really just passing by, but there was something I had to drop off to you and I thought, no time like the present.’

  She holds out a small brown packet that she has taken out of her handbag.

  I regard it with curiosity and a touch of reluctance.

  ‘Take it,’ she says kindly. ‘It’s nothing bad. We need to return this to you.’

  When she’s gone and I have shut the door, I open the packet with shaking fingers.

  Inside there is a paper bag, secured with a sticker marked ‘EVIDENCE’, some numbers and my name. I rip the seal, shaking the contents of the bag out into my palm.

  The little tarnished silver cross and chain glint back at me.

  I know the story of this necklace now. It came out in Christopher Meeks’s confession. I stir the dull links with one finger, thinking.

  After a moment I lift it up and fasten it around my neck.

  Tomorrow I’ll take it into the jewellers and get it cleaned.

  But for now, it’s fine.

  ‘So, am I coming to yours tonight?’ he asks.

  I am silent, thinking, my mobile pressed to my ear.

  ‘Margot?’

  ‘You know what, Martin, can I come to yours instead?’

  ‘What? Yes, of course. Is something the matter?’

  I play with the cross with my free hand, gently turning the cool silver in my fingers, feeling the chain brush my neck. ‘No. But there’s something I need to do, and I might be back quite late.’

  ‘Is it what you were talking about last week?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  I think for a moment. That’s so, so tempting.

  ‘No,’ I say finally. ‘Thanks. But I need to do it alone.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  I bite my lip. ‘Yeah. I am.’

  It is late when I reach my destination – nearly seve
n o’clock – and the sun has set. I have second thoughts about the whole endeavour, but somehow I manage to find the little road and bang the ornate knocker.

  When Flora Bellamy answers and sees me, her face sets like iron.

  I hold up my hands, palms outward.

  ‘It’s all right. I understand if you don’t want to speak to me, and if you like, I’ll go.’

  There is silence as she waits for me to state my business, but I can see the thin skin on her knuckles whitening around the door.

  I realize that there is no other way to do this.

  ‘My name is Bethan Avery,’ I say. ‘And I knew your daughter.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  An acknowledgement is a terrifying thing to write – no book, or indeed writer, happens in isolation. If I have missed anyone out here, I apologize now. It was not intentional.

  I’d like to thank everyone at Michael Joseph, in particular my editor Emad Akhtar (and his wonderful, perceptive suggestions for the text), my publicist Ellie Hughes and my copy-editor Shauna Bartlett. I’d also like to thank Claire Wachtel and Hannah Wood at HarperCollins and Sally Wofford-Girand at Union Literary in the US for believing in me.

  None of this would have been remotely possibly without my agent Judith Murray and her unflagging faith, encouragement, and good counsel, so all praise goes to her and to everyone at Greene and Heaton.

  I could go no further without acknowledging my buds from my bookselling days – in particular Jon Atkin, Lesley Baker, Trish Beswick, Sam Hobbs, Marie Kervin, Nick Lewis, Julian Rafot and the rest of the Manchester crew. Thanks, guys.

  I owe a huge debt to the T Party writing group in London, and to the following people for a fund of friendship and laughter: Jack Calverley, Peter Colley, Gary Couzens, Sarah Ellender, David Gullen, Caroline Hooton, Julia Knight, Martin Owton, Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Tom Pollock, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Gaie Sebold, Allyson Shaw and Sara Jayne Townsend, as well as Raymond Dickey, Chuck Dreyer, Gordon Fraser, Lucia Graves and Luke Thomas. I would also like to remember Mark McCann and Denni Schnapp, who are sadly missed.