Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

‘Margot, I-’

‘That effectively did for me for a little while, and I went to bed and didn’t get up, and then continued not to get up until someone broke in to find out what had happened to me and I attacked them.’ I inspected my dark red painted nails for an instant, then leaned back in the chair, meeting her gaze head on. ‘And so I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’

Greta had stopped smiling now, so that was a plus. I didn’t dare look at Martin.

‘I muddled along for a little while with drugs and therapy and it became clear that celebrities and copywriting and the bright lights weren’t for me. I wanted to be a teacher and work in Classics, like Mother Cecilia, because she was always a real person.’ I crossed my legs again. ‘She didn’t need a reason to help people. She just did it.’

‘Now, Margot-’ she began a little nervously.

‘The rest you know, as you have access to my social services files and have clearly not stinted from using it. The short answer to your original question, and the only relevant one, is no, I have no idea who is sending me the letters.’

I shrugged into the resulting ringing silence.

After all that, the rest was an anti-climax. Greta produced two lines of distant appeal – ‘Dear Bethan, please get in touch. I can’t help without more info’ – and it occurred to me, in a snarl of anger, that I had been summoned all the way down to London for this.

I changed it to ‘Bethan A – don’t be afraid – to help I need to know more about you’ and there was some pointless toing and froing (‘Are you suggesting that she should be afraid?’ I snapped at Greta after she had resisted this minor point for a good ten minutes) but in the end the resulting text was something we could both live with.

They also wanted to publish my picture, and as Greta talked, I realized that this was the one good idea that she was likely to have. A picture would give Bethan someone she could connect with. They suggested using the one from the school website, which cast my rather bent nose into unattractive relief, but I had a better idea – Lily dabbled in amateur photography, and could take a black and white one especially for this purpose. I have always found my school photo a little corpse-like, and the death’s head grin I wore wasn’t likely to encourage confidence.

‘There’s nothing wrong with that photo,’ observed Martin, with a gallantry that verged on the confrontational. ‘I like it.’

My heart lifted its head fractionally from where it lay in the basement of my ribcage.

But by the end of the interview, after my initial lively annoyance, I had sunk into a kind of low funk, and I wanted out; away from her, away from him. How foolish of me to think that I would ever escape the low looming shadow of my past, that in any case where it mattered I would ever be taken seriously. And yet, while I sulked as Greta fired off the email with the approved text and Martin stirred to stand up out of his cheap office chair, I could not repent embarking on this journey. Wherever Bethan Avery was, her own misery was greater than mine.

After Greta’s fulsome and false goodbyes, I trudged after Martin back past the twin gorgons at the reception desk and into the lift to the car park. He was silent and thoughtful, and I could feel the mortified blush rising in my cheeks.

You would think I was past shame by now, but you would be wrong.

As I slid into the passenger seat beside him, I could bear it no longer. I turned to him and opened my mouth to speak.

‘Margot, I’m so, so sorry about that,’ he said, his arms crossed on the top of the steering wheel, his forehead resting against them. ‘I thought she might poke around you a little, but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything like… well, what we got.’

I stared at him. ‘You knew ? You knew about me?’

He nodded wearily, not looking at me. ‘Yeah. I mean, I did tell you I’d checked you out before I met you…’

‘You said you’d looked at the school website .’

His mouth thinned. ‘Yeah. I may have done a little more.’ His fingers danced a nervous tattoo on the steering wheel. ‘Personally, I don’t see the big deal myself. You’re someone who went through a tough time and bounced back. I’m not sure it justifies all of this drama but, you know, Robert and Greta are coppers, and they think like coppers…’ He shrugged again, and his hands fell to his thighs with a soft slap. ‘They’re just being cautious.’

I looked away. ‘You know, Martin… there are things they don’t know about me at my work. About the…’

‘Suicide attempts?’

‘There was no suicide attempt,’ I said quickly, suddenly very alarmed. ‘The Narrowbourne thing was an accidental overdose of my anxiety medication. All they know at work is the one, isolated breakdown that happened years ago when I graduated and was living in London.’

They can’t actually fire you for having a history of mental illness – it counts as illegal discrimination under law. Thus, it doesn’t appear in your DBS check, which is what they call the old Criminal Records Bureau or CRB check that all teachers have to pass before they are allowed access to children or vulnerable adults.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were hospitalized twice… once in London and once here, in Narrowbourne hospital.’

‘The second time was hardly anything,’ I said, and I could feel my cheeks heating up again. ‘They were over-cautious. I was actually fine. Not that it even matters, because if they find out about the second forced admittance at Narrowbourne, I’m done at that school.’

‘But it would be discrimination if they fired you.’

I shook my head, annoyed at his denseness. ‘You don’t understand. The first one was years ago, in the distant past, but the second was relatively recent, while I was working at the school, in fact. They never found out the full extent of it.

‘They couldn’t fire me. But if they found out about it, they could make my life very awkward until I quit.’

‘Would they?’ he asked.

I paused, thinking about Ben. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you sure that’s all?’

‘What do you mean?’

He rubbed his face. ‘I get the impression there’s more. You can’t seriously think they would fire you just for the things you describe.’

I raised my hands to my temples. I was trembling.

‘Margot?’

I put my hands in my lap, faced him. I had no choice.

I had to trust him.

‘I… Martin, before the nuns took me in, I’d run away from home. I did a lot of things. I got hooked on heroin – I was injecting it by the end. The nuns got me off it, but I’ve still got an affray arrest from when I was a minor.’ I ran my hands through my hair, frantic. ‘The school can’t find out about that.’

The arrest had resulted in a caution because I’d been under seventeen at the time, and it had never turned up in a background check. I understand they’ve relaxed the rules since and my caution is less likely to turn up than ever before – but again, if the board of governors found out about my scandalous past, it wouldn’t matter. They couldn’t fire me, but I would be well on my way to some sort of constructive dismissal. After all, we couldn’t have all the little darlings at school exposed to my depraved and debauching influence. And just because they couldn’t boot me out directly didn’t mean they couldn’t make my life a misery until I left.

No, no, no. This can’t happen.

When I took my hands away from my eyes Martin was looking at me.