Dear Amy

26

I rested my weary chin on my hand.

Through the high barred windows the snow was falling, the first snow of winter, whirling past and down in huge, diaphanous pieces. It had been snowing for a while, doubtless the ground outside was now soft and white. I wouldn’t have known, I’d been sat in a cheap plastic chair for the last two hours, being mercilessly grilled like some kind of criminal.

I suppose, technically, I was some kind of criminal.

Martin stood up and offered to get me a coffee, and I nodded assent. The policeman sat opposite us leered unpleasantly.

Also with us, finally, was the legendary Detective Superintendent O’Neill, who was running the investigation, though at the moment he was largely (very large – he must be at least 6 foot 5) silent, leaning against the desk, regarding me with a curiosity that was not quite hostile, not yet, but was far from friendly, the vast surface of his forehead wrinkling at me. The reflection of myself I saw in him merited no better response. What kind of selfish nutcase, who could be able to finger a rapist and murderer of young girls, uses pitiful ruses like letters and fugue states to call attention to herself first?

I shifted uncomfortably. I had no answer for this. I had no answers at all, until somebody finally hit on the right question.

I had been astonished by the amount of personnel involved. Various people, most of whom were police officers, had come in at junctures throughout the day, wanting to speak to O’Neill about some aspect of the case, and drawing him outside the room for circumspect conversations. At one point the woman detective who had come to my house appeared. I had smiled at her. She did not smile back.

Greta was the one standing next to O’Neill now.

And as for Greta… well, the less said the better.

‘I am astonished at you, Martin. Abusing a vulnerable woman like this!’

Her complexion was marbled with red and white. She was really very, very angry.

‘I’m not vulnerable.’

She threw me a look, and I met it with steel.

‘I am not vulnerable. I don’t know if any of this is true or not. I literally don’t remember. But while my memory might not be up to much, there’s nothing wrong with my intelligence. Or my will.’

‘Margot.’ She sighed before she could stop herself. ‘Only last night you were raving…’

‘Raving,’ I repeated crisply. ‘Thank you for that.’

She blushed, red winning over white, her mouth freezing into a tough little line. ‘I only meant…’

‘I know full well what you meant. What I’m telling you is that if this is real, we need to get to the bottom of it. If it’s not real, well, that’s a problem for a different day.’ I held out my arms. ‘So, if it was real, what would you suggest? Hypnosis?’

She paused, as though lost for words.

It was her first moment of silence since she’d arrived. I don’t think she’d drawn breath before now, having hotfooted it from London by taxi and resenting the imposition every step of the way. Or resenting something. Her normally pristine little red bob looked vaguely disarrayed and her language so far, though couched in terms of Martin’s irresponsibility, had come dangerously close to using some very interesting words to describe me – elusive, troubled, and I thought but couldn’t prove that she had been within a hair’s breadth of calling me ‘manipulative’ fifteen minutes ago, but pulled back just in time.

I was disappointed, as by then I was in the mood to have a proper stand-up row with her.

Insane as it sounds at such a moment, a quiet little corner of me suspected that the thing Greta so resented might be the attention Martin was paying to the crazed lunatic with the selective forgetfulness. As she pointed, shouted and slammed down her bag on the desk, I couldn’t help feeling – from her cold glaring and the way she talked over my head, as though I were some kind of sentient vegetable – that I had achieved in a week or so what months of working lunches with Martin and jokey/borderline flirty email exchanges had not.

Furthermore, I could tell that Greta was the sort of person who considered herself relentlessly professional, because she lacked the insight to distinguish her own desires and prejudices from the diktat of authority.

As a consequence, her grudges carried to her the semi-divine fiat of law, and I had no doubt that she would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they also carried its force.

This made her very, very dangerous, so I needed to watch my step.

I let my gaze rise to Martin’s face as he placed the coffee before me – to his tired eyes, the little creases bracketing his mouth.

Oh, Martin. You need to watch your step, too.

‘We need to start the DNA testing,’ he said, and not for the first time.

The detective raised his head, as though a bell had rung. ‘Test her against what?’

‘The blood on the nightdress,’ replied Martin. ‘I know a sample was pulled off that years ago.’

‘At the very least it wouldn’t hurt,’ I threw in, despite the fact that everybody was refusing to look at me. ‘But I’m also betting that these things take a little while to be processed.’

O’Neill dismissed this as of no consequence. ‘We’ll do it. But if Martin’s right, Katie Browne is in danger right now.’ He uncrossed his arms, crossed them again. I was left with the impression of him as a huge, impenetrable fortress, and nothing useful would issue forth out of the gates until he was quite ready. ‘I don’t pretend to understand this whole dissociative amnesia thing. I always thought the trouble with bad memories is that you can’t get rid of them, not that you could forget them all wholesale.’

I opened my mouth, to attempt to reply-

‘You can’t forget them wholesale,’ snapped Martin, and there was a sharpness, a protectiveness in his voice and, wonder of wonders, I think it was meant for me. ‘That’s the point. You live in terror of remembering them. You have to work and keep working so that they remain forgotten.’ He pointed at Greta. ‘Am I right?’

‘Martin, there are a lot of factors-’

‘Perhaps there are,’ he said, and now he was getting angry. ‘And maybe none of this is anything to do with Margot. But as she keeps trying to tell you, that’s a question for another day. What I want to know is, what are we going to do next?’

‘What about hypnosis?’ I said. ‘We could do it now. You see it on the TV and in movies all the time…’

Greta exchanged a glance with O’Neill.

‘What?’ asked Martin.

‘Several things,’ said Greta. ‘Firstly, the use of hypnosis in such cases is… controversial. And possibly dangerous, in terms of Margot’s therapy…’

‘We’re not doing it for my therapy,’ I burst out. ‘We’re doing it to solve a crime and find a missing girl.’

‘Secondly,’ she continued, as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘you’d need a specialist – a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. There are medical implications.’

‘Yes, Martin said as much. Handy that we’re in Cambridge then,’ I replied, ‘as there’s bound to be one knocking around.’

‘And you’d be looking at using an injected opiate or barbiturate-induced semi-hypnotic state rather than a hypnotic trance.’

I went absolutely numb. ‘Injected?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Martin.

Greta pushed a long strand of her bob behind her ear. ‘The risk of false memory creation is too high with ordinary hypnosis. You’d require something like sodium pentothal or some kind of benzodiazepine, which doesn’t eliminate the risk of false memory or confabulation, but makes it less likely. And I say again, though nobody wants to hear it, that there would be serious psychological risks for Margot in such a procedure. If Margot really is Bethan Avery, she will experience all the emotions that grew out of the original trauma all over again. And if she isn’t… all of that will be doubly true, as I have no doubt that some trauma is present – just not the one we need.’

‘You’ll have a go though anyway, won’t you, Margot?’ asked Martin.

I did not reply. I could not open my mouth.

‘Margot?’

Martin’s expression had changed. Something was wrong.

I was shaking. I was shaking so hard that the very floor was vibrating beneath my chair, and I was astonished that they could not feel it.

‘I can’t… I thought you meant pills.’

Greta glared at me, as though I were talking in some incomprehensible language. ‘What possible difference does it make?’ she snapped.

‘I… I can’t have needles injected into me.’ I felt frozen with horror. ‘I hate needles. It’s a gigantic problem at all the hospitals when they try to treat me. I just can’t do it.’

Martin blinked at me. ‘But that’s… Margot, you told me that when you were on the streets you were an injecting heroin addict.’

I couldn’t think of a single thing to reply. There was nothing inside me but a dumbstruck amazement, a confusion, but something… something was becoming suddenly very clear.

‘Except that… that you weren’t, were you?’ he asked.

At that moment, I finally got it.

I had tried to comply, to take that leap of faith, but I had been resisting. I had not believed. Yes, my past was a muddy patchwork of experiences, frequently misremembered and often poorly understood, but still, you could say that about a lot of people’s lives.

The woman in Wastenley this morning may or may not have been my mother, and after so long doing without her did it really matter? Did she disown me because she was angry with me, with my sudden appearance, the way I bellowed at her like a crazy person, yet another victim of that fathomless rage that keeps looming like a shark’s fin out of the dark waters of my subconscious; an emotion I can neither enjoy nor control?

Or did she really just not know me?

I was quite sure I didn’t know her. But that was not true. I remembered… I remembered knowing about her. More to the point, I knew about her husband.

I remembered sitting on a street sign this morning, but does it follow that it was that particular one, on that particular street? Did I just want to make Martin happy, so my hungry, needy mind sought out this tiny detail – after all, I already knew that Bethan Avery had lived there – it would stand to reason that she would know this street corner.

But Martin didn’t ask me to sit on the sign.

I had learned not to ask questions, to live in the moment, and I’d been doing it all of my life.

I thought I did it rather well. I fooled everyone, but most especially, it turns out, I had fooled myself. My life wasn’t a mosaic of dim memories, it had been invented out of whole cloth. It was all lies, lies which I cleaved to despite the fact that they hurt me, cost me my peace, could have cost me my job, could have cost me my life, if last night was anything to go by.

It was all just lies.

And the only thing to replace them with was unimaginable horror.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was plunging for the door.

Martin found me outside, standing on the steps under the awning, watching the snow fall. He didn’t say anything, but came and stood next to me, watching the snow with me for a little while.

As far as I was capable of feeling anything, I felt grateful for this. I wanted him to put his arm around me, knew that he would not, because if it had been an unwelcome gesture it would have been an unconscionable thing to do to me at that particular moment.

Perhaps I needed to put my arm around him.

‘Margot… about…’

‘I have an idea.’

He did not reply, waiting.

‘I need some cigarettes,’ I said.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘I don’t. Or rather, I don’t any more. I gave up.’

Beside me, I could feel him wanting to object.

‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘Trust me as I trusted you. Come with me while I smoke a cigarette.’

We crossed the road to the little Co-Op opposite, and queued patiently at the counter while a man in front of us quibbled with the shop assistant over which scratch card he wanted.

Bloody hell, it was practically a tenner for a pack of twenty Silk Cut Blue nowadays. It only seemed like a couple of years since I gave up, and it was a fiver then. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

You could have knocked me over with a feather anyway.

I bought them and a pink plastic Bic lighter, which the boy behind the counter obligingly flicked into a flame a couple of times, just to check that it worked.

Martin observed all of this, and me, with an aura of bemused indulgence.

‘What’s this about?’ he asked, as we emerged back on to Parker’s Piece in the snow. It was growing, if not exactly dark, then dim.

I hadn’t forgotten that we were on a clock. Far from it.

‘It’s about drugs. And memory,’ I said. ‘Sit on the bench with me.’

We settled on the bench opposite the fire station, with its new gleaming frontage. Behind the glass panels the engines were vast and quiescent.

I unwrapped the cellophane from the packet, willing myself to remember this action – I must have done this hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of my life.

‘Am I interrupting something if I ask questions?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t make a difference. It’s beyond words.’ I thumbed open the top of the box, regarded the tesseract of packed filters within for a long moment. At one point this sight filled me with equal parts desire, self-contempt, resignation – or even nothing at all, something I did without thinking.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The minute you said it, I knew I could never have been a heroin addict. The thought of applying a needle to my own flesh makes my skin crawl. The thought of loss of control terrifies me. It had just never occurred to me before, because of course, I’d never had to think of it that way. I could remember how to do it, but I didn’t long for it. It was just a fact, one I assumed was true.

‘If I was truly addicted, I would have got past it. But no. There wasn’t even the residue of desire. Now these,’ I shook the box at him. ‘Holding these, looking at these, smelling that herby scent, that… that male scent – grassy, slightly bitter yet very rich – these hold the residue of desire for me.’ I lifted them to my nose and inhaled.

He was silent, listening.

‘Our minds are tricksy,’ I said, gazing down at the box. ‘But our senses… our senses have memories, too, and they’re harder to fool.’ I pushed one of the cigarettes upwards, drew it out, put it between my lips. They pursed around it, adopting the correct shape, as if they’d been waiting to do this for years.

I was right, I knew it.

I lifted the lighter, ignited, inhaled.

It tasted horrible. But that was OK. I expected that. It tasted like a welcome from people that haven’t recognized you yet, but will soon, and will be overjoyed when they do.

The smell of burning was like a little hearth, warming me. I blew out a puff of smoke into the cold air.

Martin’s intense gaze followed it.

‘I know everything there is to know about how to shoot up heroin,’ I said. ‘I know to crush the pills. How to cook the mixture, how to draw up the solution through cotton wool so the bits don’t get sucked up into the needle. I know everything there is to know about it, because I watched Angelique do it.’

I inhaled again, the burning, sweet heat of it. It still tasted disgusting. But I had no desire to stop.

‘Angelique’s dad… well, it wasn’t sexual abuse, the way she told it, but there was a sexual component, or maybe that’s not right.’ I shook my hand, as though to conjure the right phrase, and it seemed to work: ‘There was a control component. He made her get up at six every morning and inspected her. I mean, he watched her shower, and brush her teeth, and get dressed, until she was about fifteen years old. She kept a diary, which had to be submitted to him every week for his approval. She was allowed no friends that he didn’t vet, and he didn’t rubber-stamp any of them. They were all dirty, or sly, or ignorant, or rebellious. Basically, he had no chance of controlling them, so out they went.

‘And Angelique went along with all of it, until she was fifteen. Then she met a boy on the way home from school, who offered her a lift in his car. By the end of the week, she’d run away with him. To London. Where I met her.’ I let out a sad little laugh. ‘Isn’t that what everyone does, at least once in their lives? I did it, Bethan’s mother – my mother – did it, and Angelique did it. She ran away to the big city.’

The glowing tip of the cigarette jutted out from between my ring and index finger on the right hand, as though it had never been away.

‘I’d like to say she was happy ever after.’ The smoke curled out of my mouth. ‘But I’m quite sure that she wasn’t.’ I let my forehead sink down on to my hand. ‘I know that she wasn’t.’

He waited. The snow had stopped for a little while, but was now whirling downwards again.

I sighed.

‘Somehow, I became Angelique,’ I said. The words sat on the still air, in a little cloud of their own craziness. ‘I can’t tell which parts of me I’ve stolen from her, like the heroin, or which are really me, like the cigarettes.’

‘It will be all right,’ he said, putting a hand on my trembling arm.

I cast about me. The sun had set and the stream of passers-by was drying to a trickle. The streetlights had started to glimmer redundantly in the gloom.

I touched my hair and snow came away in my hands. I didn’t feel cold though.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s about triggers. My mind doesn’t remember, but my senses can feel the way, if I let them. I need to get up close and personal with more triggers. But first, we need to make that crew in there do that DNA. And the hypnosis. Now.’

‘You’re freezing,’ he said after a minute. ‘And we do need to go back. We can’t sit here all night.’

‘Another minute,’ I said.

‘Let me get you your coat, then. It’s only in the car.’

I nodded, these arrangements passing me by, like a dream.

I watched Martin walk up to the Land Rover, watched his feet plodding through the slush. He moved aside for a man passing along the inside of the pavement.

The cigarette had burned away practically to the filter. I dropped it, ground it into the snow.

Then something thudded into my head. I could feel my consciousness tremble and ripple, and Martin’s receding back vanished into a mist of grey. I dropped like a stone through the ripples, into nothingness.

It didn’t hurt at all.