Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

To be fair to St Hilda’s, I wasn’t exactly fired; I was placed on leave while ‘everything got sorted out’, as the head said, but we both knew I would never be coming back. I was lucky nobody was pressing charges against me, and at that point it was by no means clear that they wouldn’t in future.

Lily took me out to buy me exit cocktails at the Varsity Hotel rooftop bar, to take away the sting, but it was such a faff getting security to throw the reporters out that I couldn’t, for the life of me, relax for the first couple of hours.

That said, once they were gone, it’s impossible to stay unhappy up there, with the beautiful vista of Cambridge spread out on all sides, the frowsy towers and ivied walls, the emerald-green patches of garden, the river with its bracketing willows.

Also, they have booze.

‘What will you do?’ she asked me.

‘Years and years of therapy,’ I knocked back the remains of my white port Martini. ‘Or so they tell me.’

She tried to fight through the discomfort the idea gave her, and put on a brave face. I love her for that.

‘No, I mean, what will you do ? How will you live?’

I set the glass on the table, looked to catch the waiter’s eye.

‘One day at a time.’

‘Sweet Jesus.’

‘I see what you did there. Very droll.’

She mimed a crash of cymbals, and I laughed out loud for the first time since I’d arrived.

‘There’s a third alternative,’ murmured Martin into my hair.

‘Yes?’

‘You could choose a new name. People do in these situations.’

I fell silent. This had occurred to me before.

‘A new name.’ I relaxed into his shifting grip. I didn’t say my primary thought out loud – but it feels like more running. ‘What would it be?’

‘Anything you like. Jane Smith. Princess Cuddlybottom. Spot…’

‘Spot?!’ I slapped at his hand.

‘Desperate Davinia, the Most Wanted Woman in East Anglia…’

‘Now you’re talking…’

‘Keith Bloggs. HMS Pinafore . Knickerbocker Glory. The Big Easy…’

I laughed, smothering it against his chest. ‘The sky’s the limit, I suppose.’

‘I think you would have trouble fitting that on a credit card, but yeah, it could work.’

I sighed happily.

From then on, in private, he refers to me as Ms Limit.

Katie tries to sit up, perhaps moved by my sombre mood, and I can see her wince. This has been her third, and hopefully last, bout of surgery.

‘How did the birthday go?’

‘It was all right,’ she says. She looks down at the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your divorce.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you… OK?’ Her dark eyes are guarded, will probably always be guarded now, but there is that flicker of kindness in them.

‘Yes. He’s a wanker, so I’m better off not married to him.’

She nods, relieved. This is also her opinion.

Ours is a deeply strange relationship. Margot, or more properly Mrs Lewis, was her teacher, the authority figure. Bethan is her comrade-in-arms, the only other person in the world who knows what it was like, who survived the cellar. But Bethan is fractured and frequently missing. For all her youth, Katie has more mental strength than Bethan ever did. In that sense, she leads me, and not the other way around.

And in leading me, she leads herself.

‘It was dreadful, what he did to you. Saying all that stuff to the papers…’

I shrug. ‘You know, it doesn’t make him less of an arse, but in a way I’m glad.’

She looks sharply at me, her smooth brow bent into a slight frown.

‘It was exhausting, living a lie, never trusting anyone, always terrified I’d be discovered. And it gave me excuses – reasons to not examine why I didn’t have a normal, joined-up life, why I never stayed in touch with anyone. I always knew something was very, very wrong with me, I just never dared look too closely at why.’ I sigh. ‘This way I’m forced to confront who I was. What I did to the real Margot.’

She visibly double-takes. ‘There was a real Margot? I don’t understand. I thought it was a name you made up.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t make her up.’

My psychiatrist is a clean-cut thirty-something called Yufeng. It was he that I was finally referred to once Katie and I were wheeled out of the Grove in that ambulance, the doctor that Greta was trying to call on that last mad day that I became Bethan Avery again.

I get the impression he’s quite senior at the hospital, a hotshot with a growing international reputation, and that I’m something of a coup for him. He very kindly, after he was assigned to me, asked me if I would prefer a woman, and I told him no, I was good with this if he was. We get on – I can make him laugh from time to time despite himself – which makes me feel a lot more comfortable.

Together we embark on the course of drug-induced trances and psychotherapy my recovery requires. He tapes these sessions, and we listen to them together; I hear my own voice in the echoing acoustics of the digital recording, and don’t know it. It is Bethan Avery’s voice.

I was right to pick him in spite of gender empathy, as it turns out, because though the therapy has been exhausting and turbulent he has proved to be an unshakeable guide.

I told him that I am not that interested in recovering what happened with Christopher Meeks all those years ago, unless it is of material aid to the on-going police investigation.

‘You’re not?’ asks Yufeng, his hands steepled together, his focus in action. ‘Why not?’

‘I have always been much less interested in Christopher Meeks than he has been in me, and I see no reason for that to change. He’s going to get the full life tariff, isn’t he? I mean, they found those girls buried in the garden. He’s never coming out, right?’

‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Yufeng.

I offered him a little twist of a smile. ‘Well, then.’

‘You don’t want to know why he did those things? You’re not curious?’

My eyes narrowed, and I could almost feel him retreat, as though he had taken a psychic step backward. The shadow of my old rage lay over me.

But just for a moment. Then it was gone, like clouds passing over the face of the sun.

‘Yufeng,’ I said. ‘I already know everything about him that I’ll ever need. What I want to know now is, how did I become Margot?’

Some things I do not yet remember, and I have to take on faith. I remember escaping the Grove now, but very little else has come back spontaneously or even under hypnosis, and I have been told to expect that most of it may never.

They found evidence that I tried to make a reverse charge call to my grandmother’s house, and the new tenants – I’d been gone for two months by this time – told me she was dead. I do not recall this.

There was a coach journey to London Victoria. I don’t know how I got the clothes or money. I don’t remember losing the nightdress.

But incredibly enough, there is a record that these things happened.

It is forty seconds of CCTV footage that has survived by accident – linked to another case.

It’s Victoria Coach Station in jerky black and white.

The grainy film shows a young girl, with a slightly halting, stiff gait – perhaps she’s been cramped in the coach, or perhaps she’s recovering from some kind of fight – certainly she’s been injured. She wears a dirty dark hoodie and loose, ill-fitting pants. Despite the cold March evening she is clad in cheap flip-flops. She has no bag. She crosses the empty bus lanes with the other passengers to reach the concourse, where the camera is, in jolting stop-motion, and as she grows nearer my heart starts to hammer.