Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

Laboriously I turned myself around on the driver’s seat, until my legs rested gently on the ground outside the car. My keys swayed slightly as they dangled from the ignition.

I turned them experimentally – I wanted to switch the headlights on. Nothing happened except for a pathetic coughing noise – the battery was dead. I had left the lights on while I was out cold. I swore gently under my breath, trying again, and then again.

I was wasting my time.

My mobile lay in the passenger footwell, and I let out a little gasp of happiness. I reached down to pick it up and hit the Wake button. Nothing happened. The battery was dead.

I turned it over in my hand, trying to think despite my muzzy head. It had been charged this morning. I must have been talking to someone to wear out the battery like that, though there was no way, at the moment, to find out who.

Damn it.

Shooting pains went up through my legs as I climbed out of the car, until finally I was upright.

I was suddenly dizzy. I grabbed at the car for support and pushed my hair out of my face. My forehead felt on fire.

I looked around. I tried to understand where I was. Next to the building was a dirty yard full of disused machinery, which stopped abruptly at a hedge. After the hedge there was nothing but gently rolling silver streaked fields.

I needed help. And to call for help, I needed to be able to tell them where I was.

Walking was just as harrowing as standing up, maybe a shade worse. I was breathing too quickly.

I glanced back at my little car, huddled close to the iron shutters. I looked out over the fields, and examined the back of a huge noticeboard, erected next to a gap in the hedge that issued out into a small lane.

I had never seen this place before in my life.

I plodded up to the board, my breath curling foggily before my face. As I suspected, I was in the yard of some kind of plant or industrial site. The board said that the place was called Farrell’s Distribution Ltd. I blinked at it, uncomprehendingly.

According to the board, Farrell’s Distribution Ltd was located in Rainham, Essex. I didn’t recognize the telephone code.

There were no houses nearby, just the warehouse, the yard and then fields. If I could make the car start, there would probably be a farm eventually, or a village. As it was, I was stranded.

How had I got here?

Well, I said to myself, I must have driven here in the car. But why here? The last thing I remembered was wanting to drive to a hospital… I touched the noticeboard tentatively, to make sure it was real. The wood was freezing beneath the tips of my numb and bloodless fingers.

The moon was round and fat, bloated with white light, as it sailed amongst the needlepoints of stars. I had the feeling I was falling, even though I was standing upright. The winter air coldly searched my wound, knifing into its unhealthy, unhealing heat.

As I returned to the yard, I noticed that the trucks were gently rusting, their body parts removed by long-gone scavengers – I had driven into a graveyard of sorts. Perhaps this was a scrapyard. I couldn’t imagine what Farrell’s Distribution distributed, and I didn’t much care right then. My shoulder was pure agony, and my vision was blurring and warping.

I picked up my dead mobile and sighed. I could have charged it from the car, except, of course, the car wouldn’t start.

I drifted painfully off to circumnavigate the place, hoping to discover something useful, and almost immediately I was rewarded. Next to the big shutters, hidden by a corner of the warehouse, was a little brick extension, and a window with a Venetian blind pulled shut – it must be the office.

I would try its door and see if there was a telephone. I wouldn’t be able to walk far in my current condition.

And, I thought with a sudden flicker of cunning, if I broke in, I would be able to trigger the alarm. I could see it, a tiny blue firefly of light flickering in the eaves of the flat steel roof. The security company would come, or even better the police, and however awkward the conversation would be initially, it was better than bleeding to death or dying of exposure amongst the rusting hulks in the fields.

Breaking the glass with a piece of broken steel produced no sound other than the terrifyingly loud crash of the thick pane. Perhaps it was a silent alarm.

I cleared the sill and awkwardly straddled it, climbing into the dark space. There was a chair and a light switch. I clicked it. There was a tinkling hum and then the strip light came on. I sighed in relief.

I put my hand up to cover my eyes from the intrusive, shocking glare. I sat down in the chair, thick with black dust that had been deeply ingrained by a succession of overall-clad bottoms. An ancient desktop computer, its casing yellowed and smudged, faced me. The office was still used for something, but I couldn’t think what. There was a pale Bakelite telephone on the desk, covered with black smudges. I picked it up and, amazingly, a clear, loud purring issued from it.

There was a dirty pad of paper, of a light green colour with the letter heading ‘Farrell’s Distribution Ltd’ on it, with the address and phone number of the place. It was sticking out from beneath a pile of well-thumbed soft-core magazines for men. Semi-naked women smiled at me in encouragement. I pulled the pad out and studied the address.

My fingers negotiated the stiff and heavy keypad of the telephone with difficulty. I tried Eddy’s work, even though I knew it was shut. The phone rang. And rang. I listened dully to it. After several minutes, it became slowly apparent that I was wasting my time. When nobody answered, as I’d known they wouldn’t, I still managed to be disappointed. I tried to remember Lily’s number, but couldn’t. Or didn’t want to.

I had the absurd fear that I’d died, and that this was my Hell – to spend forever in a juggernauts’ graveyard, phoning people who never answered, under the unforgiving glare of a fluorescent strip light that made my puffy white hands and arms look like marbled meat. I shook my head, but only succeeded in making my shoulder twang painfully.

I leaned my throbbing head on the back of my hand. I should call the police. I should pick up the phone and dial 999 and tell some stolid citizen in a dark blue uniform exactly what had happened to me. But in my weak and fevered condition the prospect horrified me. I felt the same way about the hospital. The thought of strange hands touching me, and unknown faces leaning over me, questioning me, challenging me, a myriad of voices buzzing in my ears like a nest of wasps… The idea repulsed me.

Of course, this was stupid. My home had been ransacked, I had been attacked and nearly killed. I lifted the receiver again.

I replaced it. I did not want to entrust myself to the police. It had never worked before. I remembered Lily saying, ‘But he doesn’t know all about you, does he?’ in that horrid, insinuating tone, during our argument, that smug tone that undermined my reality regardless of the facts. The police would do the same…

Well, I thought, some kind of resolve thickening around my dreamy head, they can try . My house has been broken into and I’m injured, I’m cut, and it’s swollen and hot in my shoulder and it’s making me giddy and I’ve got to call somebody.

But in a minute.

I rested, to muster my courage and word my explanations, which was proving difficult. My head swam deliriously, and just then, one last sharp idea shot through it, like a little silver fish through a thick sea.

‘What city?’ said the bored voice of the operator.

My mouth, when I opened it, was as dry as dust.

‘Cambridge.’

‘What’s the name?’ Her voice was flat and contemptuous. She thought I was drunk, most likely.