Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

The small gaggle of pedestrians slow, as the ones with luggage mount the kerb. At the back, the girl, who has been glancing carefully all around herself, raises her head and spots the camera.

I stop breathing. I can see the dark eyes, the haunted expression. Though her nose is swollen and misshapen, badly broken, and her bottom lip is dark where it’s been split, I see Bethan Avery. But for the first time, I can also see me inside her.

On the last night I am out with Angelique, I tell Yufeng in my drug-drenched trance, we are somewhere out in Canary Wharf in the ruins of Docklands. Angelique is looking for this ex of hers who owes her some money. We find him, and some manner of exchange takes place under the pillars of South Quay DLR, the details of which she is very hazy about, but it involves her disappearing and leaving me alone for the best part of two hours, while I hide on a bench, partly concealed from the street by scaffolding. In fact, when she returns she is still very hazy, with that dead-eyed glaze that she wears more and more often.

I am furious and frightened because we are very likely going to miss the curfew and my bed will be given away for the night. The thought fills me with a thudding dread. What if I never get it back, and am stuck out here for ever with Angelique, in her London full of junkies and squats, unexplained favours and needle marks? This is a very real danger, as because I have no legal ID, the nuns cannot forward me on to social services as is their usual process if you stay longer than ten days. There is the real possibility that their patience will run out with me, particularly if I am regularly truant from my bed.

But I cannot tell them that I am Bethan Avery. Not now, not ever.

We need to get back before curfew, and she is making us late.

The DLR, however, is shut for repairs. We will have to walk to Canary Wharf proper. The night nips us with cold and we have no coats.

We are moving past a deserted, boarded-up house when I feel her slow.

‘Come on,’ I snap.

‘Can’t we stop for a minute?’ Her eyes drift towards the house.

‘No! We’re going to lose our beds for the night.’

‘Go on, Amy.’ This is what she calls me. It’s the false name I gave at the shelter.

‘No,’ I say coldly.

She doesn’t reply, instead voting with her feet, drifting off towards the semi-boarded door.

I can’t leave her alone in this condition.

Oh, fuck it.

I follow her.

We pad into the house. It stinks of urine and mould, but at least it’s empty. And so is Angelique, her arms slightly outset at her sides, her fingers gently waving, as though she is swimming through the fetid closeness of the old house.

I don’t like this. ‘Angelique,’ I say. ‘Why can’t you wait until we get back to Flicks?’

It’s a rhetorical question, and as I say it I can hear the defeat in my voice. She can’t wait because she can’t wait.

I try another tack, as I see her plump down on the filthy floor. ‘I am not sitting in here all night.’

Also doomed, I realize, as she flaps a hand at me. ‘Just a taste. It’s cold out there. Just to get me home.’

I sigh. ‘Just a taste.’

I watch her get her kit out – a Hello Kitty pencil case. She has about six disposable lighters in it, only one of which works at any given time. Once she has fixed herself up, she offers some to me, without enthusiasm.

‘No. Absolutely not.’

Instead, I light one of her cigarettes and sit there fuming silently while her eyes roll back in her head and she makes a little coughing noise. Then she coughs again, more loudly. She slumps sideways on to her side like a wax doll in the process of melting, and I sigh, hard, realizing that I’ll never get her back to Flicks while she’s like this.

It takes me a little while – until I finish my cigarette – to notice that she’s not breathing any more.

The ambulance seems to take for ever to come. I phoned it from the telephone box two streets away, and gave what I considered very clear directions to the derelict house, but they still stumble about for another ten minutes before I hear one shouting from within that he’s found her.

I stand on the corner, with the rest of the street flotsam, watching. My grip on Angelique’s little Hello Kitty bag is so tight my fingers hurt.

When I understood she was dead, there was a strange moment when I stopped swearing at her and commanding her to breathe. My conscious emotion was a kind of irritated fury, but to my surprise, I then burst into a hot white flood of fat breathless tears, squirting out with the force of bullets. I am, for some time, unable to master myself, even though in the back of my head I can hear a voice like hers screaming, ‘GET UP, GET OUT, THE PLOD WILL COME YOU STUPID COW!’ and I know it’s right, I know it’s true, but I cannot move.

The telephone box stinks of urine and is dotted with cards for prostitutes. I rub my wet red eyes with a scrap of tissue I find in her bag. The tissue is spotted with tiny drops of her blood.

I put the tissue back in the bag, and in the bottom I can see the last remaining detritus of her life. A new packet of three condoms, one missing. A half pack of mint Polos. A little bottle of Ysatis. A small roll of banknotes, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds. This astonishes me. I don’t think I’ve ever held this much money at one time before now.

There are also a few cards in the bottom of the purse – entries into clubs, vouchers for free food at charities. But there is also one – laminated – and I turn it over under the streetlights as the wail of the ambulance dies down, examining it under the hectic red and blue lights.

It’s a college ID card for West Hyrett School, which I’ve never heard of but is apparently in Essex and ‘Encouraging Excellence’. There’s a passport photo on it of someone it takes me a second to identify – a studious brunette with thick glasses and bright pink lipstick. It’s Angelique, of course, in her previous life, her hair a lacklustre centre parting, but her big eyes and good skin glowing through. I don’t recognize the name beneath the picture. She smiles, that crooked, secretive smile. I can feel the tears – powerful but mysterious – fighting their way back.

But I remember where I am. I drop the card back into the pencil case, drop it all in her handbag and holster it over my shoulder. The ambulance men have not come out of the house, but the police have arrived. It’s time for me to go. Tilting my head down and away, I head back towards the bright lights of London Bridge and a place to spend the night.

She didn’t look like a Margot.

‘You took her name.’ Katie’s hands are laced together over her bandages as she relaxes back on the bed.

‘Yes. I stole it. I stole her life.’

‘Stole it?’ Katie considers this. ‘You sound like, I dunno, you feel guilty.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not guilty. She didn’t need it any more. I did. But still.’ I sigh. ‘It wasn’t mine.’

Katie is silent. She is thinking it; what Martin is thinking, what I am thinking.

I leave her with a kiss.

When I get home, I have barely hung my coat up before the doorbell rings behind me.

It’s Susannah, or more properly Detective Constable Watson, who came to my house after the letters were verified.

‘Hiya, Margot.’ She grins at me. I’d seen a lot of both her and Eamonn (her boss) during the trial and we’d all become quite friendly, but that was a couple of months ago.