Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  I wished I’d thought to ask Selena for her email address, so I could send her the link. I wondered if the photo of the French photographer constituted enough of an excuse for me to call her, and decided it wasn’t. If I was sensible I’d admit it was time to forget the whole thing.

  Instead, I thought about the defunct Walsey hospital, the many hundreds of keepsakes and letters and postcards they must have had to dispose of when the place closed down. Boxes of them, probably, letters that had been written to or from ex-patients who were now either dead or recovered or absconded, living ‘in the community’ or lapsed so far into delusion they were different people. Letters that never arrived or were never sent.

  I thought about the dead letters of the dead, the thousands of miniature worlds and paper castles, guarded secrets and confided dreams and ancient enmities. Letters burning on bonfires and forgotten in attics, mouldering in landfill or kept guiltily in a suitcase under the bed, eventually destroyed by an indifferent grandchild when the owner of the suitcase, also, gave up the ghost.

  * * *

  It was Selena who phoned me, in the end. “I know this must sound weird, but could we meet up?”

  I took a few moments to answer, as I knew I should. “What’s this about?”

  “I looked you up on Google,” Selena said. “I found that article about your dad and how he died.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I understand. That I know what it’s like to lose a father. I don’t mean just generally, I mean when he’s not… when he’s not how he was.”

  * * *

  Selena looks older than she did in the photographs. I don’t just mean that she has aged – we have all done that. I mean she looks at ease with herself – at ease in her own body – in a way the snapshots of a pretty schoolgirl never hinted at. Her clothes – a closely fitting trouser suit and jersey top – are unobtrusive but flawlessly right for her. The ring she wears, a ruby, is especially stunning. She barely resembles Amanda at all now, and yet I feel convinced that if it were Amanda sitting opposite me in the café she would still look exactly as she did in all those old news photos: unmade and slightly scruffy, not properly of the world she was forced to inhabit.

  She wouldn’t hesitate with her words the way Selena does, either, not because she’s more articulate but because she wouldn’t be embarrassed and wondering what the hell she’d been thinking of, asking a perfect stranger to meet her for coffee.

  I made sure to get there first, so as to be already seated when Selena arrived. I didn’t want the whole of our meeting to be influenced by her inevitably faulty perception of my disability.

  Disability! What a weasel word that is, and how I hate it. I was in a car accident. My girlfriend Anya was driving. My spine was injured. The upshot is that I can only be on my feet for about fifteen minutes before excruciating pain sets in. I sometimes have to use a wheelchair, but not too often. The doctors seem to agree that neither the effects of the injury nor the pain will get any worse, which makes me pretty lucky, all outcomes considered. Anya died at the scene, as the saying goes, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like telling you what that actually entailed.

  The cafe I suggested to Selena as our meeting place is just about the only venue that is close enough for me to feel confident of walking there and back without folding up on the pavement. Luckily the coffee is so good here it’s almost criminal.

  “What you mean is that my father went mad and blew himself up. Shit happens.”

  I can see she’s blushing. “I wouldn’t say mad.”

  “Wouldn’t you? I would.” I am about to start reeling off my litany of synonyms – crazy, barking, insane, batshit, mental, loonytunes, marble-deficient (there are plenty more; believe me, I’ve made lists); all those mordant-ugly-beautiful words I start spouting when I’m feeling defensive, or angry, or when I simply want whoever I’m talking to to shut-the-Jesus-fuck– up – when I remember that Selena is not just a bystander. Her father was in the Walsey. She probably knows the list of m-words as well as I do.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. It’s a rare admission, though she can’t know that yet. We are barely acquainted.

  “Don’t worry. I get it.” She sips at her coffee, holding the cup between her hands in a manner that seems oddly out of keeping with her elegant appearance, a gesture that belongs to an earlier part of her life, when she sat side by side with Amanda on the living-room carpet drinking a mug of Horlicks and watching Black Beauty or Dick Turpin or Tales of the Unexpected.

  There are parts of us that can never be eradicated. Not by ourselves, not by the world either.

  “Dad lost track of himself after Amanda disappeared,” Selena says. “At first it was just small things – never being able to miss a news bulletin, all that driving around he did. But in the end everything mounted up and he collapsed. The doctors said it was simple exhaustion, but Mum and I both knew it was more than that. You can’t avoid knowing, can you? Not when you live with someone. He was supposed to be in the Walsey for a couple of weeks at the most – to give him a rest, the doctors said. To recharge his batteries.”

  “But they kept him in?”

  Selena nods. “Mum and Dad had split up by then and Dad was too ill to manage by himself. And to be honest he seemed happier there, more stable. Less overwhelmed by things. Perhaps I’m kidding myself.”

  I don’t answer. She hasn’t come to me for platitudes. “His whole life became about finding her. Amanda, I mean. He refused to even consider the possibility that she was dead. He had a room at Mum’s, you know, for when he came to visit, and it ended up crammed to the ceiling with all this stuff he was hoarding. Newspaper articles, magazine clippings, anything he could find about missing people and unsolved crimes. He couldn’t let go.”

  “What did the doctors say?”

  “They said that until he learned to accept that Amanda was gone, he would never be well again. Dad wasn’t having any of it. He said that what they told you in hospitals and schools was a form of brainwashing, that the people in authority wanted you to accept their version of things because it was more convenient. For them, I mean. If you carried on believing something they didn’t want you to believe, they said you were mad.”

  Well, he had a point, I think but don’t say. I sense that Selena is eager to ask me about my own father. That’s what this meeting is about for her, isn’t it? Swapping stories? Comparing experiences? Tallying up the points to see whose dad was maddest? Her questions are so rankly present I can almost smell them. Imagine her disappointment if I were to tell her that no, Dad didn’t go off the rails, not until that final second when he put his decision into practice, and even the decision itself would have been carefully arrived at. There were no outlandish, glorious delusions, no gradual slide into lunacy. He made a mistake, that’s all. A bad one, granted. The guilt must have cannibalised his brain like cancer. But no one knew what he was going through, least of all me. An army man till the end, that was my father.

  “My father was tired, I think. He let things get to him.” This is a part of the truth at least, and I think Selena must realise this, because she nods to herself, just slightly, and then carries on speaking.

  “Dad became obsessed with Hatchmere Lake. The police spent a lot of time searching around there. At the start, anyway. They didn’t find anything, but Dad kept on at them, he wouldn’t let up. He had this theory that Amanda had been abducted by aliens. He got the idea from Amanda’s diary. She’d written something in there about someone called Cally, and a city of white buildings on the edge of a lake. The police were fairly certain that Cally was just Amanda’s code name for Allison Gifford – that was the teacher she was friends with – but Dad wouldn’t have it. He called the Detective Inspector an idiot, right to his face.”

  I have to hand it to her. In the mad dad delusion rankings alien abduction has to be the winner.

  “Why do you think he thought it was aliens?” I am genuinely curious.

  “Goodness knows. Because she’d
just vanished, I suppose. There was nothing else, no other explanation that made sense. Not that aliens made sense.” She laughed. “It was strange, though, even for Dad. He was never into UFOs before.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Heart attack. He was sixty-five. The hospital said his body was worn out, basically.”

  “You must miss him.”

  “I do,” Selena says. “I really do.”

  There are tears in her eyes, and I find myself wondering if it is not just her father she is mourning, but the possibility he seemed to offer, that her sister was still alive somewhere, and that the universe was not so small as everyone insisted.

  * * *

  We became friends after that, sort of. I learned that Selena worked as the manager of an upmarket jewellery store owned by a Russian businessman who claimed to be a direct descendent of Ivan the Terrible. “He is seriously temperamental but he has a good eye,” Selena said when she told me. She smiled. I was beginning to suspect that Selena knew more about diamonds and precious metals than any amount of Russian oligarchs put together. We had nothing in common, not really, but that didn’t stop us finding plenty to talk about.

  I never told her that I’d steamed open her father’s envelope. If you’re going to admit to something like that you have to do so upfront. I’d chosen not to, and so I kept quiet. I didn’t see that it mattered much anyway.

  We started meeting at the coffee shop fairly regularly. We even went to the cinema now and then. About six months into this new period of our relationship, Selena told me the second half of the story she’d begun confiding to me the first time we met, namely that two years after her father died, a woman made contact with her by telephone, claiming to be Amanda.

  “I met with her a few times,” Selena said. “For a long time she refused to say what had happened to her. She said she couldn’t remember. In the end she told me she’d been taken to another world. She didn’t know how she’d ended up there, or how she got back, just that there was some kind of war going on, and that whatever had caused the war was coming here.

  “She seemed really upset about that for a while. Eventually she stopped talking about it. It was like she’d given up. I had no idea what to say to her. It was like Dad all over again.”

  “What was she like?”

  “I don’t know. Normal, I suppose, apart from the whole other planet thing. She kept on at me to let her meet Mum. I didn’t want her to – Mum had been through enough already. But she was determined and in the end there was nothing I could do to stop her. She found out Mum’s address from the Internet and just turned up there. I thought Mum would throw her out but she didn’t. She stared at her for a moment, then wrapped her up in her arms, hugged her really tight, as if she knew who she was without having to be told. The oddest thing about that was that Mum had never been a huggy person, not even when we were little. She and Amanda never got on all that well either. They were always rubbing each other up the wrong way. They were just so different, I suppose.”

  “Different how?”

  “Mum’s the most practical person on the face of the earth. She’ll do anything for anyone but she has no time for bullshit. Amanda’s moods got on her nerves.”

  She asked me if I’d been close to my parents and I said no, not really. I preferred it that way, I could have added, but chose not to. I asked her what had happened with the Amanda woman.

  “She’s still around, as far as I know. I speak to Mum on the phone now and then but we don’t really talk. Not any more.”

  I wanted to ask her if she thought there was even a chance that the woman claiming to be Amanda really was her sister, but I sensed the issue was still too raw. If she wanted to tell me more, she would. It would be wrong to press her. We moved on to other subjects – her job, my research – and then we paid the bill. “Would you like to see something she wrote?” Selena said as we were about to leave. “This woman, I mean.” She reached into her handbag and drew out an envelope, a brown A5 envelope exactly like the one Raymond Rouane’s letter had arrived in. The coincidence startled me. Of course such envelopes are sold in their millions, but even so. Inside the envelope was a letter, two sheets of typed A4, folded in half to fit. There was no address at the top, just the date, a year ago, more or less.

  The address on the envelope – Selena’s – had been written in loose block capitals, with a blue felt-tip.

  I know you don’t believe me, but I want to tell you again anyway. I was taken from Hatchmere Lake near Warrington to the city of Fiby, which is the smallest of the six great city-states on the planet of Toshimo, a thousand light years away on the fringes of the Aw galaxy. Cally says that our peoples are related, although the ancestral links between us are shrouded in billennia. Fiby is the coldest of the cities, situated on the northern shore of the Marillienseet and the only one of the six in the southern hemisphere. I was brought to Fiby because that is where the transept lies. I don’t properly understand the laws of the transept, but I know it was created by engineers of the Lyceum in Clarimond, and that places on either side of the transept are each a perfect mirror image of the other. Hatchmere Lake is identical in every way to the Shuubseet, the slipper-shaped, forest-fringed fishing lake at the city’s eastern frontier. You could superimpose an aerial photograph of Hatchmere Lake on to a photograph of the Shuubseet and there would be no discrepancy. The volume of water from one lake would perfectly fill the other. The only difference is that the Shuubseet is far older. There are Wels catfish in Hatchmere Lake, only probably not the giant ones we used to scare ourselves with stories about when we were kids – the lake hasn’t been around for long enough. The Shuubseet is as old as the Earth itself. Older, probably.

  There was a lot more, all equally outlandish. What could I say? I had no idea. There was something beautiful about it, though. There is no limit to what the human mind can invent. I wondered who she was really, this woman, and what she wanted. What con artists normally want is money, but Selena’s income was perfectly average and her mother didn’t earn a fortune either, so far as I knew.

  Could she be the real Amanda? The idea seemed almost as far-fetched as what she’d written in her letter.

  “What do you think?” Selena said, when I’d finished reading.

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe in life on other planets.”

  “We can’t know, though,” Selena said. “Not for certain.”

  She’s right about that, there’s no denying it. We know as much about the universe we live in as a woodlouse under a paving stone in my back garden knows about Sierra Leone. “Are you going to see her again?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can face it. She’s got Mum now. I mostly think I’m better off leaving them to it. I’ve got my job, my house. I’m fine, really.”

  We made a date for the cinema the following Saturday, and I thought what I’d often thought since meeting her: thank goodness I didn’t fancy her, not even a little bit. It’s good to have someone in your life that you can spend time with, without it landing you in trouble.

  * * *

  My father, Peter McConahey, was an explosives technician with the British army. You would probably refer to him as a bomb disposal expert. He loved his job, and he was brilliant at it. But the problem with a job like Dad’s is that if you cock up even slightly there’s a better than even chance that people will die. Dad was defusing a device that had been placed inside a police compound in Kuwait during the aftermath of the American bombing of Libya. A section of flooring collapsed while he was working, triggering the bomb and killing three Kuwaiti police officers and five international aid workers on the floor below. By an outrageous fluke – several hardened soldiers called it a miracle – Dad was thrown clear. Everyone including the official investigators agreed he was blameless, but that didn’t stop my father blaming himself. He killed himself on his next tour of duty, defusing a car bomb. His civilian friends were horrified, his army colleagues were saddened and greatly surprised.
Dad was a career soldier, trained to deal with all eventualities. In the end though they came to terms and carried on, because what else could they do? Dad’s death could not have been predicted, or prevented. You never know how someone will react to trauma until it happens.

  I was at university when it happened, here in Manchester. I didn’t tell anyone. There was a memorial service for my father, which I attended, but I let people think I was going home for a weekend visit, nothing more. That was shortly before the summer vacation, when I moved out of university accommodation and into private digs with three other women, including Anya. No doubt it was my change of address, almost at the moment of my father’s death, that meant I didn’t receive his letter until after I graduated. Someone in halls just happened to see me, and passed it on – apparently the letter had been kicking around the accommodation admin office for more than a year.

  Seeing Dad’s writing on the envelope, the tense, slightly messy black handwriting that always seemed so at odds with the coolness of his outward persona, the writing I’d recognised when I opened the Lucy Davis letters and tried so hard to forget, was, as Selena had put it, like seeing a phantom. I saw from the postmark that Dad had posted it about a week before he died – too late to reach me beforehand but long enough in advance to prevent the letter being intercepted and impounded as evidence. It had slipped through the net, perhaps more completely than Dad had intended, though it was clear to me that he had planned this, as he had always planned everything, down to the last detail.

  In the letter, Dad told me the story of his relationship with an army translator named Lucy Davis, how Lucy had become pregnant and given birth to a child, a little girl called Sarah. I couldn’t be present at Sarah’s birth, my father wrote, which is something I regret to this day. Dad said he loved Lucy in a way he hadn’t thought possible. I loved your mother, he wrote, but we were too alike, so determined to be independent we never allowed ourselves to need each other, not properly, not even after you were born. I regret that, too. Dad tried to persuade Lucy to be with him, but she didn’t want to be responsible for his divorce. That’s what she told him, anyway, although I suspect it was Dad she didn’t want to be responsible for. Perhaps she realised how cold he could be sometimes, unreachable as the ocean floor and just as dark.