Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

‘Doesn’t look like your usual fare, Margot.’

I looked up from the last page and saw the headmaster, Ben, who’d stalked into the staff room without me noticing. He had paused to tower over my chair. His mouth, with its little grey square of surrounding beard, was a set grimace of disapproval; his pale eyes flicking down to the lurid cover and then back to me.

‘No,’ I stammered, realizing what I was doing. ‘It was recommended to me. By a friend.’

‘I see.’

I could feel my age slipping away. At that moment I was about seven years old.

But then I had a sudden flash of Lily’s drawing, from Saturday – of me as a cowering little girl in pigtails when really I was a Fury.

I coolly let my eyes fall back to the book.

He was about to add something else when the bell saved me.

Ryan Sipley, the chief wag of Year Eight, was stuttering and sweating. He was engaged in a fierce war with the English language, and today’s battlefield was Jane Eyre .

‘“This is my wife,” said he.’ Ryan looked imploringly at me, begging me to pass the bitter cup of reading aloud to some other unfortunate.

‘Go on,’ I said.

I felt terrible. He hated it, I knew. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that reading aloud is good for kids. They have to engage with the text; even what appears to be the most colourless and stammering rendition implies choices in what to emphasize and what to play down – what to show and what to hide. It requires you to structure your language, to be fluent, to wrestle with what you are saying, to face the crowd. I could only hope that at some point in the future, in some social situation that presumably didn’t involve reading aloud from Jane Eyre , this practice would bear fruit for Ryan.

It still made me feel like a heel.

Three girls in the last row were passing texts amongst themselves and giggling at the back of Sorcha Malone, who usually sat with them but must have offended them in some way, as she was now parked three rows in front. Her face was stony pale and her eyes pink with unshed tears.

The girls’ ringleader was Amber McGowan, known bully and scoundrel. I eyed her keenly, having now chosen the next candidate for this literary trial by ordeal.

‘“Such is the sole… co-juggle…”’

‘Conjugal,’ I supplied gently. ‘Take it to mean married.’

His face went scarlet. I decided to have mercy.

‘Thank you, Ryan. Amber, can you go on please?’

Ryan sighed audibly in relief. Amber McGowan’s head started guiltily at the mention of her name. It had been bent over her iPhone; her book lay under her arm, forgotten.

‘What, Miss?’

‘The book,’ I said coldly. ‘Do you know where we’re up to? And there are no phones in my class, Miss McGowan, as I believe you already know. If I see it again it’s going in my desk until the end of term, do you understand?’

She half-covered her smiling mouth with a mock embarrassed hand. ‘I don’t know where we are, Miss,’ she lisped self-consciously.

One of her toadies had been following the text on her behalf, and with the place pointed out to her, she adroitly picked it up.

‘“Looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon…”’ She pushed a lock of her long hair out of the way of the page.

Amber read on, by rote, imbibing none of the sense of the book, only repeating the words. What a waste of time. I glanced at my watch. Another twenty minutes to go…

If I didn’t do this, I reminded myself, there was a good chance that at least 50 per cent of them would never ever read Jane Eyre , picking up the answers to essay questions from friends and parents, or even just guessing. I’d asked Ben if I could show them a DVD of it, and he’d stuffily replied that we didn’t possess one. I’d asked if I could buy one out of school funds, and this proposal would now be hummed and haa’d over in every Tuesday lunchtime staff meeting until kingdom come. I could buy one out of my own money, but I’d probably have to fight to show it – the headmaster took a very dim view of the ‘pornographizing’ of modern popular culture, and would use the platform at the meeting to explain why he would not be ‘actioning’ this without more thought.

I would usually say something inadvisable in response, such as observing, in my capacity as an English and Classics teacher, that ‘pornographizing’, like ‘actioning’, is not and never has been a real word, and even if it was, it made no sense in the context of any recent film adaptation of Jane Eyre .

And then the others I work with would start to cough and look at their watches and make excuses to leave. And so everything stays the same; always the same.

I wondered if Bethan Avery had ever read Jane Eyre . I wondered whether she would just have repeated the words, or whether she would have understood the sense…

I ran a finger over the white pieces of paper I keep on my desk to make notes. The paper felt warmer than I did. The top of the book was visible from where I was sitting, poking out of my bag. I could see its bloodstained title.

It was a horrid story.

Bethan Avery was fourteen years old, the child of Melissa, a career drug addict, and fathered by some unknown quantity during a sojourn in the bright lights of the capital. Bethan slipped straight out of the womb and into care. Her mother fought intermittently to get her back, with frequent tragic bouts of determination to ‘turn her life around’, which could last as long as nine months; but her demons, though they could be persuaded to give her a long leash from time to time, never truly let her go. In the main the baby stayed with her grandmother, Peggy, a cheerful, gruff soul who did her best.

Eventually Melissa vanished – went abroad to pursue a ‘modelling contract’ in Amsterdam and was never heard from again. Meanwhile, life in the end cottage on Parkhurst Lane continued as normal. But one icy January in 1998, there was a terrified phone call from one of the neighbours – Peggy had slipped and smashed her skull on her frozen doorstep. Bethan was fetched from her first day back at school and brought to Peggy’s bedside. Peggy had been prepped for surgery and was wheeled in.

At some point somebody noticed that Bethan had gone missing.

I sharply recalled myself – I was once again in my class, watching the white scalp of Amber McGowan through her pale hair as she bent over the book. It might be her that had written the letters.

It might be anyone.

I gazed over the bowed heads of my class, silent while Amber read, restless and aware that she was being singled out, and increasingly bold about showing her displeasure. I knew the kids sometimes wrote fake letters to the column, trying to get one over on me. In fact, only a few months ago, two idiots in Year Twelve had attempted such a thing over email, but had forgotten that the school’s IP address was visible.

Nevertheless, they had not yet ever pretended to be a murdered schoolgirl – and considering how subdued, even shocked, they had all been since Katie’s disappearance, it seemed unlikely they’d try now.

The sad fact, though, was that as tasteless as such a fraud would be, especially considering Katie’s disappearance, it was still well within the bounds of possibility.

There are reasons children are not allowed to vote or be left unsupervised for long.

It took hours for anyone to realize that Bethan had not just nipped out for a moment alone – something had gone horribly wrong. She had vanished from the hospital, and nobody knew where to or how.