More Than Love Letters

by Rosy Thornton

  And you? You know, you really ought to do something to take your mind off men. Other than your witchy support group stuff, I mean. You could come and see me – you know you’re welcome any time.

  Great big hugs,

  Becs xxx

  From: Margaret Hayton

  [margarethayton@yahoo.co.uk]

  Sent: 22/7/05 18:55

  To: Rebecca Prichard [becs444@btinternet.com]

  Dear Becs,

  Well, until Monday, my closely nursed plan had been to spend a large part of the summer holidays in Richard’s flat. In fact, to be brutally frank, in Richard’s bedroom, in the approximate vicinity of the bed. So now, nothing particular in prospect. Might go to Mum and Dad’s for a bit. I’ve definitely promised Gran a visit – I had intended to take Richard down there, too. She’ll be disappointed, because they got along really well.

  We’ve finally decided, after another month gone by with no word, to report Nasreen to the police as a missing person. Mind you, I don’t exactly expect the Met to pull out all the stops looking for just another young runaway – a foreigner at that, and not even underage. Alison says that once last year Marianne went on a bender and didn’t turn up for three days, so on the third evening they reported her missing at Ipswich police station. The desk sergeant solemnly took note of all the details and circulated her description, but it later transpired that they’d actually had her belowstairs all day, floating slowly back down to reality in their own cells. I feel I ought to go back to London and continue the search for Nasreen myself, but I’m pretty sure it would be fruitless, and somehow, on my own, I don’t have the heart for it.

  I was watching the six o’clock news just now, downstairs with Cora, when Snuffy came in from the garden with half a rosemary bush forming an extension to her imperviously wagging tail. She flopped down against the settee to watch the rest of the bulletin with us, apparently blithely unaware of the mass of spiky vegetation adhering to her nether end. By chance, the next item concerned the ever-mounting stakes in the War on Terror. Heightened airport security, Aunty Beeb reassured us, is the latest plank in the nation’s defence against terrorist atrocity – this bracing news accompanied by footage of two officious-looking spaniels, one black and white and one liver and white, applying enthusiastic noses to the contents of a litter bin. So, on the one hand, ranged against us we have the uncompromising and unknowable might of Al-Qaeda. On the other, lined up in defiant opposition, we have, er . . . a few extra springer spaniels. I must say, it is not a thought to make me sleep any easier in my bed at nights.

  Anyway, I’m very grateful for the invitation to come and experience for myself the glories of Moss Side – I might well take you up on it.

  Much love,

  Margaret x

  From: Rebecca Prichard [becs444@btinternet.com]

  Sent: 1/8/05 18:33

  To: Margaret Hayton [margarethayton@yahoo.co.uk]

  Well, Margaret, I have abandoned my uncharacteristic cloistered ways. There was a medieval fair this weekend, out of town on the Cheshire side, and I went along on a reconnaissance mission for school. Useful, too. I think the kids would enjoy a visit from this shoe-maker I came across. He not only shrinks his end product to the size and shape of his feet by soaking them in his own urine and wearing them in that state overnight, but also prepares his shoe leather himself, straight from the abattoir it appears, and swears by dog faeces as being an unrivalled caustic agent for use in the tanning process. Believe me, that man brings a whole new dimension to the concept of smelly feet!

  But where was I? Oh yes, my abduction from the convent, which was effected by a gentil knight in shining armour, resplendent upon a white charger. Fate willed that his name is Hugh, which seemed suitably seignorial. Or that’s what I thought it was at first, but it turns out to be Huw (he’s from the Rhondda valley), which if not positively Arthurian is at least redolent of the Celtic fringe. Of which he possesses rather an attractive specimen, shading mystic jade-green eyes. And actually the horse was brown (so, also the wrong hue). Anyway, he is a telephone engineer during the week and a historical reconstructionist at the weekends, with a nifty line in jousting. (We’ll take as read the jokes about how he handles his lance, shall we?)

  It all happened when I was watching the grand tourney. At the entrance to the lists, Huw’s refractory steed decided to take a dislike to all the fluttering flags, and began cavorting and tittuping in a theatrical style, rolling its eyes melodramatically, and moving in any direction but forward, like a temperamental supermarket trolley. Huw applied his homemade spurs with a little too much vigour, the horse kicked up its heels in protest, and one horseshoe flew off and caught me a far from lucky blow across the right instep. (It had been shod, I afterwards learned, by an anthropology student named Henry, a callow and implausibly unsinewy youth, who had only lately turned his hand to costume blacksmithery. The horse itself, fortuitously also called Henry, was moonlighting from its day job at the local riding school.) Huw dismounted at once, and my flow of muttered expletives was arrested in midstream by the blaze of concerned green eyes, rendered strangely disembodied by the interjacent visor of his helmet. Paying no heed to my protests, he picked me up bodily and carried me over to Henry (the equine one), who was standing nearby on three and a half legs, nonchalantly browsing the clover and trying to look uninvolved. Huw lifted me into the saddle, managing to redouble the pain in my foot as he did so, with an unscheduled bash against the pommel (or it might equally have been a pastern, a poll or a pelham, for all I know the difference).

  Once inside his tent, the deftness with which Huw removed my Timberland and slid his finger down into my sock captured my attention immediately, and my outrage began to be tempered with warmer feelings. These increased when he doffed his helmet, and unbuckled his breastplate to reveal a buttonless shirt and an expanse of well-muscled knightly torso. (Though, given his ancestry, probably in reality more collier than warrier.) I offered to help him off with the rest of his armour, and found myself coming over like Sir Thomas Tom of Appledore (‘at times like these the bravest knight may find his armour much too tight’). It turned out that Huw had also been brought up on Now We Are Six, and we were soon both giggling like schoolgirls on a sugar high. But later, when he was reclining armourless and openshirted on a pile of sheepskins by the flickering firelight, I can tell you, kid, Huw looked all man. In fact he was every damsel’s dream come true. I was lost – and all for want of a horseshoe nail.

  You see how I live only to divert and entertain you with my amorous exploits, and take your mind off Richard? How is the trying-to-forget-him-and-move-on coming along, by the way?

  Love and hugs,

  Becs xx

  From: Margaret Hayton

  [margarethayton@yahoo.co.uk]

  Sent: 7/8/05 23:51

  To: Rebecca Prichard [becs444@btinternet.com]

  Dear Becs,

  Dear oh dear. Following your exploits with the pornographic plumber, I fear you have now strayed into the pages of a trashy historical bodice-ripper. I’m not sure that the carrying off and ravishment of nuns is exactly consistent with the ideals of the age of chivalry – though I expect a lot of it did go on. If you twist my arm I could give you 4.5 for ‘seignorial’, I suppose, and a 3 for ‘refractory’, which I always mistake for a kind of dining room. And OK, no lance jokes, but what about his sword? I bet he can hew away pretty smartly with that, too!

  You have cheered me up no end, thanks, Becs – and boy, did I need it! It’s not proving so easy to put Richard, and Helen, and the whole awful business out of my mind. Her father has been banging on in the paper again about an inquiry, though I must say Richard seems to have backed off a bit now. He hasn’t been quoted talking about it again, so maybe he has rediscovered some remnants of conscience. But there’s something else. Helen left a diary. Pat T. and Emily at the hostel found it when they packed up her things. They wanted to give it back to Helen’s mother with the rest of her possessions, but I said that then it wo
uld never be read, would probably just end up thrown away, and I couldn’t bear that to happen. So I kept it myself. It has taken me until now to bring myself to open it at all, but once I’d started I haven’t been able to stop. It’s incredibly painful, but I feel this horrible compulsion to read every word (so far I’m up to midway through 2003). In a funny kind of way, I feel that I owe it to Helen.

  I remember Richard saying that they used to call one of the Labour Party’s 1980s election manifestos the ‘longest suicide note in history’. But it wasn’t – this is. It’s agony, reading about her life in that family – what that man did to her, and how it made her feel. And then I get even more knotted up inside, remembering that Richard was prepared to meet him, to fight his corner, to lend his support to the public pretence that Helen’s depression and suicide were just bad luck, just one of those things that can happen, even in the nicest families. However much I miss him, and whatever else he’s done, that’s the one thing for which I can never forgive him.

  But, this visit? Would it still be OK for me to come up? (That is, if you aren’t engaged full-time in the lists . . .) Are you doing anything later in the week? I’ll call you tomorrow.

  Love,

  Margaret xxx

  Extract from Helen’s diary

  Tonight I was suddenly remembering when I was fourteen, and Danny Mercer asked me to dance at the school disco. He was cute, and kind, and his hand holding mine was soft, not like Dad’s at all. But the thought of Danny touching me sent me into a flat panic – he would know! As soon as he touched me he would know the truth, they all would. I found it difficult to believe that they couldn’t all tell already, just by looking at me. Look at Helen, look what she lets her dad do to her.

  We did dance, uncomfortably, just one song. I held him at a safe distance, stiff-armed, and Danny was either too sweet or too inexperienced to try to soften my hold and draw me in closer. The next day, at break, he asked me to go to a film with him at the weekend. I almost said yes, before I remembered that the cinema meant darkness. How could a person of fourteen explain being afraid of the dark? Worse still, it would have meant that ever-present nightmare, a pressing darkness heavy with the fear of unseen invading hands . . .

  From: Rebecca Prichard [becs444@btinternet.com]

  Sent: 14/8/05 22:04

  To: Margaret Hayton [margarethayton@yahoo.co.uk]

  Hi Margaret,

  It was great to see you last week, hon. I’m really glad you came. We shouldn’t leave it so long next time.

  But I am worried about you. You’ve got even less colour than normal (if that’s possible), and I couldn’t fail to notice you not eating anything. You can wear baggy jeans all you like, babe, but your wrists are like sticks – remember, it was always how we used to spot the anorexics at college? And that accursed diary! Don’t imagine I didn’t see it there, pushed discreetly under the futon, when we were folding it back up. You’ve got to stop torturing yourself. It can’t help Helen now, and it’s certainly doing you no good at all.

  I know you are badly in need of something to smile about, so please excuse the rather lumpy segue from tragedy into farce . . . but you might like to know that Sir Huw has receded back into the mists of history whence he came. I spent the weekend at his place. He is an asthmatic, and his condition is brought on specifically by certain plant allergens released by rain during the summer months. Moving away from South Wales was, in the circumstances, a wise decision, but the choice of Greater Manchester as a destination somewhat less so. Huw harbours the belief that sleeping in a room with the windows sealed tightly shut will prove a deterrent to airborne pollen particles. With Saturday’s thunderstorm sending clouds of the offending motes into the atmosphere (thereby transforming Huw’s lungs into a pair of bagpipes), and with temperatures over the weekend soaring to 30 degrees even in Lancashire, conditions in his bedroom last night resembled those endured by troops engaged in desert warfare wearing full chemical protection gear.

  He has a fan, which besides emitting a constant, sleep-preventing, clattery whirr, serves only to move around the same indecently hot air, which thus plays over your skin like a hairdryer. Fans also have a tendency to make me wake up in the morning with a stiff neck, so I was obliged as a precautionary measure to make my attempt at sleep clad in a pair of his fleecy pyjamas, with the collar turned up against the tropical sirocco. (I considered and rejected the extra protection of a woollen scarf.) Add to this, if you will, the auditory assault of Sir Huffsalot’s laboured breathing: each breath in a quick, tight, gravelly gasp, and each breath out a series of softly modulating musical whistles. (This Sir Hugh, take my word for it, certainly did not ‘make a nicer sound than other knights who lived around’!) At first his wheezing exhalations sounded to my overtired and overheated brain like his name, Huw, repeated over and over. Then the whole thing started to remind me, in its endlessly repetitive variations, of a Mike Oldfield track which my mother used to put on while she was ironing. I nearly had to get up and phone her to put an end to the jaw-grinding frustration of not remembering what it was called, and would surely have done so if it had not by then been 3.47 a.m.

  I might also say that Huw’s breathing gets even more noisy and desperate during any physical exertion. Luckily any such activity on his part tends to be short-lived. (Or unluckily, depending on whose side of the bed you look at it from.)

  Perhaps the whole thing was an elaborate ruse on his part to discover whether he really was more dear to me than breathing. Well, he wasn’t, so I’ve left him to it.

  Big hugs,

  Becs xxx

  (Huw probably begins with a W or a Y in Welsh, anyway.)

  Extract from Helen’s diary

  Maybe he won’t come. That’s what I used to say to myself, the words repeating over and over, hammering in my skull like a mantra into the silence: perhaps tonight he won’t come.

  I used to bargain with the fates, there in the almost darkness. I’ll give Joanne Miller my new strappy top with the sequinned butterfly on the front, only don’t let him come. So many nights: howling November blackness, frost-stilled Januaries, creeping April dawns. But memory, playing false, casts me always in the sticky heat of high summer, the sweat prickling along my back and thighs, as I lie stifled, unbreathing, but afraid to throw aside the make-believe protection of the quilt. Between my prison-bar fingers I can see the digital display floating in the darker patch above the bookcase which I know to be my Scooby Doo alarm clock. 2:23, 2:24, 2:25. If it reaches 2:30, he won’t come, I plead. 2:26, 2:27. If I get ten out of ten for spellings on Friday, he won’t come.

  Even when I’ve heard, along the landing, the soft click of their bedroom door, the rush and gurgle of the flushed toilet which will be his alibi should she wake at his departure – the same flimsy, mechanical gesture to be repeated on his return. Even then . . . If it reaches 2:45, he won’t come. My eyes sting from staring at the luminous disembodied numbers, willing each flicked change. 2:41, 2:42, 2:43.

  And now every night, still, my brain pounds out the endless, unclosed deal. I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good – only please don’t let him come.

  From: Margaret Hayton

  [margarethayton@yahoo.co.uk]

  Sent: 15/8/05 20:51

  To: Rebecca Prichard [becs444@btinternet.com]

  Dear Becs,

  Too bad about the puffing cavalier. And look out, the lans of Manchester!

  I did some serious thinking over the weekend. I had, in fact, put Helen’s diary on one side while I was staying with you. I admit it was under the futon, but I had stopped reading it. But when I came home I plucked up the courage to read on to the end, and it was pretty harrowing stuff, as you can imagine. Poor Cora had to mop me up a few times, while I was getting through it. But one thing that is clear is how much it helped Helen, when we were all coming round to sit with her in the evenings. And it occurred to me that a lot of young people with mental health problems are probably very isolated, like Helen was. They might
not always want to talk to their family, or the family might be too close to the problem. And off-loading on their friends might be too risky; they might not want to risk driving them away. You could be scared that your GP might try to section you if you said too much. There are the Samaritans, of course, but for that you have to feel able to talk. Somebody on the end of a telephone line can’t put her arm round you, or play Scrabble with you, or sit with you while you fall asleep. So my idea is a voluntary befriending scheme for teenagers who are depressed and vulnerable. Giving them someone to be there and listen, someone who won’t be scared off by their pain, because that’s why they’re there.

  I really needed to ask someone if it was just a crazy notion or not, and I must admit that it was Richard I thought of first, but of course he’s no longer here to ask, and anyway, what did he ever care about Helen or other people like her? So I phoned the ever-sensible Alison (from WITCH) and she says she thinks it sounds feasible, and Cora, somewhat to my surprise, is also really keen. I think perhaps Helen’s funeral really affected her. She is going to see if she can get some seedcorn funding from the Charitable Donations Fund at her bank.