Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

I had to go too.

I should have been terrified, or at least nervous. But I can honestly say that I wasn’t. These swinging fits of despair and hope seemed normal to me. I suppose Eddy would say that I wasn’t in my right mind. Maybe I wasn’t; maybe I was in some other mind – a mind that was more my own than any other. I think I was excited, more than anything, terribly excited. Perhaps I was terrified, but I enjoyed the terror. Is that strange? I was menaced, but for once it wasn’t the ghosts of my own mind that haunted me so tirelessly, so inconclusively, but something active, something evil, something cruel and decadent, something I could hate with a will.

I was sitting on the church steps, and instead of being in a frenzy of fear, I felt tensely calm and utterly vindicated. Let them do their worst. I was hunting for lost things, and if I could find Bethan then I would prove to my doubting and querulous heart that nothing was lost for ever. That peace and contentment and innocence and justice were not lost for ever. That I was not lost for ever.

I stood up, dusted my hands on my sweatpants, and went home to get changed and get into work.

When I got back to the house, Eddy was there.

I had a little warning beforehand, but not much – I had been strolling along our road in the morning sunshine, enjoying the cool breeze against my hot, sweaty skin, and the birds as they flitted through the tree branches while I wound the cord of my headphones around my iPhone.

I was wondering if there was any way to go in and check Dear Amy’s post without having to run into Wendy, who, since my first television appearance, had raised her game in terms of passive-aggressive digs. I had been led to understand in no uncertain terms that all of this extra work and fuss I had put the staff through was extremely inconvenient.

And yet, when I came into the Examiner ’s office last night after school, looking for any more letters, she had practically run from the other side of the office, shooing away the intern standing directly in front of the cubbyholes and reaching to fetch my post, in order to hand the bundle to me herself with the maximum possible bad grace.

In short, I was deeply preoccupied that morning, so I didn’t spot Eddy’s smoke-grey Porsche Carrera parked up on my right until I was nearly on top of it – I could have reached out and touched the bonnet. The driver’s seat was empty.

I felt a little giddy, a little sick. What now?

I shoved my phone into the pocket at the back of my running leggings and pulled out my house keys while considering my strategy.

The truth was, I didn’t have one. I simply didn’t want to fight with Eddy at the moment. I had things to do, things to think about. The idea of it exhausted me and left the fragile accord I’d come to with myself on the church steps in shreds.

Why couldn’t he just sign the arbitration? If he signed the arbitration, we could talk about the rest. I didn’t want anything unfair. Why was he behaving this way?

I was going to have this conversation with him now, and ask him. Like a grown-up. There would be no repeat of the scenes at Ara’s house the other day. I forbade it.

I turned on to my path, past the high hedges of unruly leylandii, and sure enough he was waiting on the step.

‘You’re still running?’ he asked. The sun gleamed in his golden hair. ‘I keep telling you it’s terrible for your joints.’

His voice was faintly hoarse.

Straightaway I could see that something had changed, and not for the good. When he had appeared here last time he had been impeccably turned out, as was his habit when going to or from work.

This new Eddy looked as though he’d been out all night. His shirt was crumpled and limp, his coat thrown over it, the jacket missing, the tie just a little off-centre, his shoes dull with a slight patina of dust. I daresay anyone else would have found him respectable enough – he’d shaved and his hair was neat – but I’d had four years of getting to know all of Eddy’s idiosyncracies. Something was wrong.

‘And yet I still persist in it,’ I said, coming to a stop before him. ‘Like you. Why are you here?’

‘What, we can’t talk any more? Do I have to book an appointment with you now you’re a TV celebrity?’

‘I thought we were doing this through your lawyers.’

‘We could still discuss it like reasonable people.’

I folded my arms. I was shaking a little, and it wasn’t just because I was cooling down.

‘We could indeed,’ I said, ‘but I’m left wondering why you’d buy a dog and bark yourself. What are you up to?’

He offered me his tight, crooked smile.

‘You’re being very paranoid, Margot.’

‘Not paranoid. Direct . It’s completely different.’ I cocked my head at him. ‘Did you call me last night?’

‘What?’

‘Call me,’ I supplied again. ‘Last night.’

‘No,’ he said, but there was a rising note in his voice, and I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. ‘Are you going to invite me in?’

I considered him for a long minute. ‘This isn’t a good time. I need to get to work in an hour and a half.’

‘It won’t take long.’ His hands fell into his coat pockets. ‘And it’s urgent, Margot.’

I raised my eyebrow at him, but I was already applying my key to the lock. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a little shrug. ‘I need your help.’

So once again he was in my kitchen, and I was making him coffee. He took a seat at the pine table, and as I stole surreptitious glances at him in the reflection of the kitchen window, I could see he looked older, tired, and there were dark pouches under his eyes when his face tilted forwards.

Despite myself, something within me clenched in pity. I wanted to go over, put my hands on the tense muscles of his shoulders, knead the knots out of his hard flesh, feel the warmth beneath my palms; in short, to get on with pretending that none of this had happened.

It was impossible, but I wanted it anyway.

‘You said it was urgent,’ but there was a soft note in my voice.

‘Yes. I need some money,’ he said.

This was so frank it took me a second or two to parse it. I put the kettle down.

‘You want me to lend you money?’

He shook his head. ‘Yes. No. In a way.’ He sighed, leaned back in the chair, and there was no disguising his tiredness any more as he rubbed his eyes. ‘Ara and Gareth are trying to force me out at Sensitall.’

I blinked at him. This was very bad news for Eddy. Everybody knew the company was going to do very well indeed in due course, but for now, things were still building. If he was forced out, a great deal of his work would have been for nothing.

‘Gareth has issued me with a parting offer that’s worth about…’ he paused, as though catching himself before saying too much, and there was a flash of banked cunning in his expression that hardened something in my heart, ‘… about a third of my real share.’

Gareth was the other partner in their start-up business, who contributed capital and had got them the lease for the offices. My mind ticked and whirred – of course, he’d been an ‘old friend’ of Ara’s, and she’d brought him in.

I’d met him a couple of times at dinner parties and company social events at expensive restaurants and hotels – a squat, short man with thinning ginger hair and a pronounced underbite beneath his moustache. He’d always been extremely charming and gallant with me, exercising a flirtatious banter that seemed to maximize my personal vanity without ever crossing over into insolence.