Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

And yet, there was always something about Bethan. Bee. The first one.

She’s come back.

His head rolls back hard against the driver’s seat.

‘What the fuck does she want?!’ he bellows at the roof of the car.

Chris never forgot the first day he met Bethan.

He hadn’t been living at the house then – nobody lived there – it was kept pristine waiting for whenever some scion of the owner’s family wanted to visit. There was a woman from Cherry Hinton that came in with her daughter to clean once a week, and they would chatter to each other in some alienating, nonsensical Eastern European language. Sometimes, in their sly glances and incomprehensible tittering, he caught the signage of their contempt.

He lived in the village full-time then, a mere half hour’s walk from the house. And walk he did, rain or shine, through the narrow streets and drowsy houses with their smattering of trees, until he reached the gravelled track to the Grove. The trees stopped there, and he joined the Fens – flat, bleak, washed with rain. In ditches on either side of the raised drive secret weeds grew, and overhead every so often flew fat black crows, or the large, streamlined shapes of swans. The wind howled here, knowing no impediment, all the way in from the North Sea. Its icy ruffling felt like a kiss against his face.

The house belonged to the Fen. Years ago the family that owned the Grove had farmed these lands, but no more. Now their patrimony was the house and the walled garden and the keeper’s cottage in amongst the outbuildings. What would have been an undulating landscape of walks was now under the industrial plough. The house was empty most of the time, an afterthought in the life of the family. It existed liminally, the vanishing relic of a lost way of life.

Chris could sympathize. He was also part of a lost world, where men like him had no place.

In his dusty backpack he carried his usual lunch – a cheddar cheese sandwich on thin sliced white bread, a Penguin bar and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps. It was what he had eaten for lunch every day, more or less, for the last fifteen years.

The backpack also contained two unopened letters, thrust into its bottom, to be read later. One was a thin envelope from the Avon and Bristol Police Force, and its smallness and slightness already told him to expect bad news. Another rejection.

The other was A4-sized, made of stout brown paper, and about a quarter of an inch thick. His hands had shaken slightly as he’d packed it. It was risky to take it out of the house, even though the odds were good that he wouldn’t see another soul today. That envelope could get him into a lot of trouble, should it fall into the wrong hands.

Its weight against his back made him sigh. It might not be strictly proper, but a man needed his pleasures. Chris did not have access to this new thing, the Internet, and what he heard of it did not fill him with confidence, but the magazines and newsletters of his earlier years were getting harder and harder to get hold of, and consequently the risk involved in getting them was growing. More and more of them were shutting down production, or featuring muck-brown foreign girls instead of the decent English ones he liked, or using older tarts to play young girls. None of it would do. English roses, that was what he wanted, barely more than budding. A man couldn’t help what he liked, after all.

‘Come on, Bee, we’ve got to get to school. We can look for it later.’

‘I know, I know, just give us a sec.’

He had been so lost in his reveries, thinking about what might be in that brown envelope, waiting for him, that he had utterly missed the real thing.

Two girls stood in the ditch on the side of the road; they’d been hidden from him by a bend in the track. One was short and plump and mousy blonde, though the way her school skirt skimmed over her generous bum was not without interest as she bent to inspect something in the thin ditch water. Had she been alone, he might have approached her, engaged her in conversation, manoeuvred himself into accidentally-on-purpose touching her through the taut grey serge, letting his fingers flicker over her. That was the trick, leaving them so they weren’t sure if it had been an accident or not.

And out here, on her own, what could she have done about it? Or said about it afterwards, to others?

Had she not been so near to the village, depending on her reaction, he might have ventured more.

But she was not alone. The other girl stood, her arms folded disconsolately around herself, her face hidden by her overhanging dark hair. She was tall, but not too tall, and slender, but not too slender, and her stooped posture and neglected unhappiness, something he’d taught himself to recognize, shone out like a dark sun.

He could feel something within him start to pulse, urgently, and when she raised her face and he saw her sad dark eyes, her full mouth, he could hardly breathe.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked suddenly, treating them to his most disarming grin, the one he practised in his mirror at home for exactly this kind of occasion.

The dark girl, Bee, shrugged silently, but the little blonde one offered him a sunny smile, full of repulsive pert confidence. He immediately realized that touching her would have been a bad idea, and swallowed down a little spurt of dislike.

‘It’s all right. Bee’s lost a necklace. A little silver cross. We was walking back this way last night and it must have broke.’

‘It was my mum’s,’ said the dark girl, this Bee. Her voice was low and sweet, and full of unspoken appeal. Those heavy brown eyes were upon him. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen it, Mister?’

‘No, no,’ he rapped out quickly, trying to control his hammering heart, his shortening breath. Her lips were a perfect deep rose. ‘But why do you think it’s in this ditch? Surely you’d be better looking on the road.’

‘We thought we saw a kingfisher down here,’ said the blonde girl. ‘But it weren’t.’

He didn’t even look at her.

‘Yeah,’ said Bee. ‘I wanted to show Nat. She’s never seen one.’

‘And it was definitely around here, then?’

They nodded, though the dark girl did so a little hesitantly, as though not sure. The corners of her eyes were crinkled a little, the whites red with distress. How old was she? Fourteen, fifteen? He longed to slide his arms around her, to comfort her, to pull her close. He drank in the sight of her, trying to think of something to say, something that might detain her.

‘A little silver cross, you say?’

‘C’mon Bee,’ said the blonde girl quickly, her voice strained, flat, oddly neutral. ‘We’ll be late for school. We can come back later.’

He glanced at her, impatiently, and realized his error – her suspicion was writ large on her face, before being quickly hidden. She didn’t know what she suspected yet – she was a little too young – but she had picked up on his eagerness, his interest in her friend, and realized it was not quite… normal.

He cursed himself for a fool.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bee, reluctant to leave and seemingly oblivious to her friend’s alarm. ‘We should go.’

It would be a mistake to try and keep them now; it would only compound his bungling.

‘Very true,’ he said, affecting the tones of a concerned adult, the-fun-and-games-are-over-now type. ‘You can’t be late for school, girls. But what should I do if I see your necklace?’

He grinned at the object of his desire, waiting for the gift of her address, her phone number.

The blonde girl’s gaze narrowed at him.

‘You could leave it at our school, St John’s. It’s only in the village.’ She took the dark girl’s arm, pulling her after her, towards the lane, leaving him behind in the ditch.