Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

I knew, with utter, iron certainty that I was in deadly danger.

I let out the handbrake and raked the gears into reverse. The tiny reflection of the man in my rear-view mirror started to run towards me, the smile dropping a few degrees. I squealed into reverse and he stepped back, mouthing something I didn’t hear but presumed was an obscenity.

Then I revved forward, shooting towards the exit ramp. In my mirror, I could see the man scurrying away, becoming smaller and smaller before vanishing down a stairwell, his coat trailing after him.

The whole incident had lasted perhaps three seconds.

I drew up to the road, my fingers trembling around the wheel. I checked my mirror again. The mirror reflected the car park, empty and harshly lit, framed in concrete. He was gone.

I swerved violently into the road and drove to the police station.

‘So what did they say?’ asked Lily.

The kids were in bed, and her mournful mother had retired upstairs with a low-voiced goodnight.

My hands shook around the mug of tea she’d made me.

‘They just asked me if I knew either of these men. I said no, and they said that unless they’d actually spoken to me, that was it. They said he sounded like a mugger.’

‘So it was definitely two different guys?’

‘Yep. I’d swear to it. This one was… more personable, if that makes any sense in the context of a weirdo that follows you into an underground car park. And I… I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think he was younger, too.’

Lily folded her arms and sighed furiously, making the little tendril of hair hanging down from the crown of her head blow upwards. I smiled weakly at her from the sofa and shrugged.

‘So you have to be raped or murdered before they can shift themselves to do anything?’

‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘in a nutshell.’ I leaned back into the soft cushions and closed my eyes.

She drummed her fingers on the armrest, regarding me thoughtfully, and as she did the rapid little tattoo she was beating out slowed, moved into something more speculative. ‘Fancy something stronger than tea?’

‘I’ve brought the car with me,’ I muttered dolefully.

‘That’s what taxis are for,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Red or white?’

She moved off into her kitchen and I rubbed my face with my hand. It was still trembling.

‘But here’s the thing, Margot,’ she called back from the kitchen. ‘Why would anyone follow you?’

I started, a little surprised. She knew all about the business with Bethan Avery, of course. ‘It must be something to do with the letters,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why else I’d be so interesting.’

‘And you told the police this?’

‘Well, yes.’

She reappeared at the kitchen door with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which she was uncorking while she talked.

‘Margot, can I ask a question? Without you getting mad?’

Half of her mouth was screwed up in a tight little grimace.

I shrugged, or I might have shivered. ‘Sure.’

‘When was the last time you went to the doctor’s?’

I blinked. ‘About a fortnight ago. I don’t know. What’s that got to do with anything?’ But I saw, with horrible sureness, what she was getting at.

‘Don’t you think you should make another appointment?’

I licked my lips. No, I thought, I don’t.

‘I don’t see how it’s relevant,’ I said, trying to sound calm, measured and reasonable.

She nodded, as though a personal theory of hers was being proved.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s not just me. There’s all sorts of… take Martin Forrester for instance, he doesn’t-’

‘I’m not being funny, Margot – really I’m not. It’s just that sometimes…’ She sighed, as though considering an unpleasant task. ‘Something can feel very right when you’re in it, and then…’ she trailed off, as though searching, ‘But it can turn out that the things driving your interest are not what you thought they were.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, a little coldly, even though I think I did. ‘There are other people who…’ I was about to add, ‘believe me’, but hearing the pining, apologetic slant in the words, I stopped myself.

She sighed.

‘But this Martin Forrester doesn’t know all about you, does he?’

You bitch, I thought, with something like wonder. This, I had not foreseen.

‘He doesn’t have to know about me,’ I said angrily. ‘This isn’t about me .’

‘I don’t know if you realize you’re doing it,’ said Lily, raising a silencing hand, ‘but the fact is that you keep doing the same thing. You start feeling better, feel better enough to stop the pills, and then once you do, things start to fall apart for you.’

‘They’re only sleeping pills…’

‘They’re not only sleeping pills. They’re anti-depressants. You were given them to help you sleep, true, and they’re a lower dose, but you’ve talked yourself into believing that they’re simply sleeping pills.’ She bit her lip. ‘You do this a lot, Margot. You minimize . You ignore the obvious and hope that sending your problems to Coventry will somehow make them evaporate.’

‘Maybe my problems would evaporate,’ I said with chilly preciseness, ‘if people would stop reminding me of them whenever I feel I am starting to outgrow them.’

‘That’s not fair.’ She was making an effort to keep her voice even, but the high spots of colour were starting to bloom in her cheeks, and her eyes were narrowing. The wine bottle had stilled in her hands. ‘I am merely suggesting that you have been off your pills for three weeks, and now you are being written letters by dead girls and followed by masked gunmen. You write for an advice column, for fuck’s sake – of course you’re going to get crank letters. It doesn’t mean you have to make it all about you.’

I was speechless, though my mouth opened, moving helplessly.

‘You think I’m making this up?’

Her lips thinned, and inside her head I could see that determination warred with diplomacy.

‘Margot, I’m not saying you are imagining these things, or at least imagining all of them. I am just asking you to consider the possibility that you being off your meds and these things suddenly happening to you might, conceivably, have a correlation.’ She held out her palms, as if to demonstrate she had no more concealed weapons. ‘That’s all.’

But she didn’t need any more concealed weapons. She’d already stuck me, hard enough for blood. I was recoiling, and all I could think was, I need to get out of this house right now.

‘Margot, no, don’t, don’t leave like this-’

I’d already snatched up my bag and pushed past her, through the door and back out into the night; with its freight of sinister and perhaps delusionary predators, its memories and its acid cold.

I drove home. My phone rang. I switched it off. I remember almost nothing about the journey – the next thing I recall is being sat at my own kitchen table, with the desk lamp on, wiping the tracks of tears from my face with a furious energy that burned the skin beneath my fingers.

I’m a crazy person.

And so we’re back here again.

I don’t know who I am. I’ve never known, it seems, but the world is full of opinions on the subject. I had a breakdown. Well, one and a half, if we’re heading towards full disclosure. A few people know about it, because it is good to have friends, good to confide, is it not?

But telling people things about yourself is always, always a mistake – like a drug, in a way – the euphoria of communication and trust is always followed up by the regret of paranoia and suspicion. You describe yourself shrieking and being dragged backwards into rooms with gurneys and hypodermic needles – horrible, horrible needles – and there is a part of the other person that will always see you that way.