Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

We joined the general melee in the corridor, all in genial chaos now that it was lunchtime. I led, aware of her shuffling behind me, taking her up the stairs and towards the Classics office, a tiny room little better than a converted broom cupboard, with a single small circular window, like a porthole. The office makes me claustrophobic so I try to spend as little time as possible here, but it’s the one place I can be guaranteed a degree of privacy when I chat to the students.

‘Just set them here on the desk,’ I said, and her pile of books joined my own. Silently, I closed the door behind her.

Sorcha actually has an assigned pastoral care teacher, but for some reason they all come to me. I would love to tell you that there is some deep-seated reason for this, that it’s to do with the fact that I am so cool and approachable and down with the kids and all, but to be honest, while I have no idea why it is, I am pretty sure it is none of the above.

‘Sit,’ I said.

She did so, almost hesitantly. She was in two minds about being here, I could tell.

‘Is this about Amber and the others?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah.’

I waited, letting her collect her thoughts.

‘I’m not speaking to Amber right now,’ she said.

‘I see.’

‘You knew?’

‘Well,’ I said, shrugging – Amber’s carpeting in Ben’s office was not really any of Sorcha’s business – ‘it was pretty obvious that there was trouble in paradise in my English lesson last week.’

Her face was heating up, becoming redder, and she wiped at her wet pink eyes with her sleeve. I offered her a tissue from the box I keep on the desk for this purpose.

‘We fell out over Katie Browne,’ she said, and as she said it, she let out a little sob.

‘Yes. Amber got into a little trouble over that,’ I concede.

‘I mean, she’s really nice sometimes – I mean Amber – and to be honest, I didn’t have that much to do with Katie, she was kind of on her own a lot, you know? I mean, other than the swimming, she didn’t really hang out with the rest of us.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘But me and Amber,’ she said, and her loneliness was so poignant I wanted to hug her, ‘we… we’re best friends, and we have a great laugh, and everything would be fine if it weren’t for Laura egging her on all the time.’

I sighed and crossed my legs. Laura had not been in evidence during Amber’s Facebook fiasco – she’d managed that all on her own. Girls like Amber play the Lauras and Sorchas of this world off against each other, to bring out their worst selves.

What I really wanted to say was this: ‘Sorcha, you may not believe this now, but as much as Amber feels like your best friend and you can’t imagine life without her, I promise you faithfully that the minute you leave for university you will not exchange more than a hundred words with her for the rest of your life. And what’s more, this will be a source of enormous relief to you.’

But of course I can’t say that. One of the more glorious aspects of the column is that I can be a little more forthright.

‘I know Amber said those terrible things,’ said Sorcha, her hair twisting in her hand, ‘but she didn’t mean them.’

‘Why would she say them, then?’ I asked.

Sorcha twitched out a little distressed shrug. ‘It’s just showing off that she’s not scared – but it is scary, you know?’

Her gaze sought my own.

‘Yes. It’s scary.’

‘I mean, everyone’s been saying Katie ran away, but what if… what if she didn’t? What if something has happened to her and nobody is looking for her?’

‘Who told you no one’s looking for her?’ I asked, trying to sound calm, but my spine chilled with a frisson of alarm. Only Ben and I had been in the office when the policeman had arrived to say that they were investigating the possibility that Katie had left willingly due to trouble at home and that we could scale down the security measures the governors had put into place.

Sorcha shrugged. ‘Isn’t it obvious? They stopped coming around asking questions. She’s not in the news any more.’ She swiped at her face. ‘It just… terrifies me that she could be out there and nobody is looking for her.’ She glanced up at me, her eyes filled with the heartbreaking seriousness that only children can possess.

‘Yes,’ I said, and with real feeling. ‘It terrifies me, too.’

I was writing a reply to an email from a girl who was convinced she was pregnant as a consequence of wearing her boyfriend’s underwear. It was quite amazing, the number of letters I received in this vein. It’s like the Internet never happened, though it may be that my correspondents are clever enough in their own way: Internet searches can be traced. Can I get pregnant from a toilet seat, a dirty towel, if I don’t have an orgasm, if it’s my first time? Am I safe if I drink a bottle of gin and sit in a scalding hot bath afterwards? If I take a contraceptive pill beforehand?

Am I safe?

These letters depress me immeasurably for all the obvious reasons.

All of these prepubescents and their endless terror of pregnancy. But I suppose I can see it. Social stigma, tearful parents, fleeing boyfriends, finally being shunted into a council rat trap with a screaming incomprehensible little monster, their frustration aggravated as opposed to palliated by the odd benefit payment.

Maybe if we all, men too, looked after everyone’s kids then I wouldn’t feel like I do, and they wouldn’t feel like they do – an idealistic thought, I acknowledge, but it keeps recurring.

‘The whole reason you want kids,’ I said out loud to myself, in the mistaken belief that this will make me take what I am saying more seriously, ‘is so you can make it up to yourself for having such a lousy childhood. And that’s selfish.’ Maybe so. Maybe. Well, no maybe about it, really. It’s not some deep-seated instinct. Just a psychological gratification, sharpened by the fact that I can’t have children.

I looked at the clock. It was already 3 a.m. I hit Send on the email, CCing in my private work account. Then I encrypted the work file, turned the light off and headed upstairs to bed.

I fell asleep straight away.

I dreamed of Bethan Avery.

In my dream I was lost in a maze, a dread-haunted Demeter searching for her Persephone.

There were corridors everywhere – a hospital that looked exactly like Addenbrooke’s – vast, sprawling, a lino-floored labyrinth. There is a monster in the centre, I understand in my own dream logic, a minotaur that is always searching for me.

The place was full of bustling faceless figures. None of them seemed to pay me the slightest attention as I drifted along, my quest offering no real impetus, instead just a woolly sense of foreboding. If I glanced from side to side I could see strange things through the windows to the wards – doctors and nurses slithered in and out of their uniforms as though shedding skins, and open doors breathed, slow and deep, as if nameless things slept behind them.

‘I don’t know where we are,’ I told a young woman who confronted me in the corridor, arms folded.

‘I know.’

‘I’m looking for Bethan Avery.’

She glared back at me, dark eyes bright in their surrounding thicket of clumpy mascara, her peroxide blonde hair a messy halo around her head, and for a nightmare instant I thought she would hiss at me like a serpent.

‘The world passeth away and the lust thereof,’ she answered. And then she let out a single mirthless bark of a laugh, and there was something familiar about it.