Strangers (12 page)

Amy.

She saw the look of recognition on the woman’s face. For a moment they stared at each other across a gap of almost sixteen years, then the woman moved away and was lost in the crowd.

‘I think I just saw a ghost.’ Roisin sank down into the reclining chair and kicked off her shoes. ‘That’s better.’

Joe stood at the other side of the room watching her. ‘A ghost?’ His face was in shadow.

‘Just now, at the party. There was a woman there. I thought–at the time I could have sworn–that she was someone I used to know.’

‘Why a ghost?’

‘It must have been–what, sixteen years ago? Something like that. The woman at the party, did you see her? She was tall with red hair and she was wearing a black dress. For a moment, it was Amy to the life. But now…I don’t know.’

His voice was quiet. ‘Amy.’

‘You know her?’

‘Amy Seymour. Yes. She works at the hospital.’

‘She was Amy Fenwick when I knew her.’ So it
was
Amy. Amy, after all these years. She had been
working with Joe. He knew her. ‘That’s so…How is she? What’s she doing?’

‘I don’t know her well. She seems…OK, I suppose. She’s in charge of the unit for premature babies, and she works for a women’s health clinic. Roisin, why is she a ghost?’

‘We were friends, years ago,’ Roisin said slowly. ‘I was seventeen. I was in the middle of the adolescent rebellion thing, you know?
You aren’t my parents. You’re keeping secrets
–all that sort of stuff.’

He was frowning as he looked at her. ‘Were they?’

They’d never talked much about this before. She wasn’t sure why, but she had always steered away from the topic of her adoption. ‘They never talked to me about it. It was as if that part of my life, those first years, were some kind of mistake, a false start. They didn’t want to acknowledge them. I told you my birth parents were dead, right? They died in a car crash.’ She pushed the hair back from her face and showed him the small scar on her hairline. ‘That’s how I got that.

‘I don’t remember them, nothing about them at all. I have flashes sometimes–I can remember someone giving me a ride in a wheelbarrow. People are laughing, but I can’t see their faces. It wasn’t my family–my adoptive family. And I can remember another child. I can remember holding hands with another child for a photograph, and being frightened when the flash went
off.’ And a voice singing to her, a few remembered lines:…
between the salt water and the sea sand
…

‘But that’s about it. It’s like I woke up when I was four, and I was living with my mum and dad in Newcastle. My parents wouldn’t talk about it, but I knew I could remember another child. All the time I was growing up, what I wanted most was a sister. And then Amy…’

She looked away, trying to collect her thoughts. ‘We met at college. We were both doing A-Levels. I was straight out of school and as dumb as they come. Amy was different. She was a year older–that’s a lot, then–she was smart and she was cool. A lot of the students were a bit intimidated by her. But we really hit it off. We both had backgrounds that were…different, I suppose. She’d been in care, I was adopted. It was like I suddenly had the sister I’d always wanted, only without all the fights and the jealousy and the rest of it.’

She could picture Amy in her mind as clearly as if it had been yesterday; not the woman she had glimpsed at the party, but the adolescent Amy. Then, Amy had been a bit too tall, a bit too thin, not quite comfortable with her body. She was ebullient and extrovert, street-wise in a way Roisin couldn’t then aspire to, giving the college lecturers a hard time, helping Roisin to plan the ways she could outwit her parents’ strict curfew. She took pride in her lack of family–much the best way
to live, she had insisted. She had no one trying to control
her
life, unlike Roisin.

She and Amy, sitting in Amy’s flat smoking–Roisin’s first experience of hash. She could remember looking out of the window to the estate laid out below her, the deep amphitheatre with its tiered blocks, the bright colours of the paintwork, the gardens and the hanging vines. Amy had been standing at the window, drawing the smoke into her lungs and watching the distant river. ‘One day,’ she’d said, ‘one day…’ And her gesture had encompassed the world that lay beyond the mouth of the river. That was when they’d started their plan to travel once they got their exams. Neither of them had left Britain’s shores before. Roisin had never even left Northumberland. She’d lost Amy, but the desire to travel had remained.

‘My parents didn’t like her,’ she remembered now. She could still see the way her mother’s lips thinned every time Amy’s name was mentioned. At the time, it had made Amy seem even more desirable.

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, I did a lot of things that would have horrified my parents if they’d known about it.’ She smiled at the recollection of their Goth clothes and their determined cool. Some of their exploits came back to her, not all as harmless as climbing through the girders of the iron bridge to get the correct angle for a photograph of the Tyne. Whatever else
had happened, she and Amy had had fun. ‘But after a while, she told me a bit more of her story. She’d been taken into care after her parents had been killed. She said no one wanted to adopt her because she was too old and she was difficult. And she said she’d had a sister who she always used to look out for, but her sister was taken away from her and adopted.’

She looked across at Joe, who was listening quietly, a faint line appearing between his eyes.

‘It got me thinking. There’d always been a gap, like I knew something should have been in my life and wasn’t. I started telling myself that I was Amy’s sister, I was the child who had been taken away and adopted, that my parents, my adoptive parents, had deliberately kept us apart because they wanted me all to themselves.’ And there had been just enough of that kind of possessiveness in her mother’s anxiety to make her fantasies possible. ‘I knew deep down it couldn’t be true, but I believed it anyway.’

And that was why she still thought about Amy, even after all these years. Their friendship hadn’t been just the companionship of shared fun and risk as they spread their wings together. There had been no one she could talk to the way she could talk to Amy, and Amy had told her things she wouldn’t tell other people.

Joe was watching her in silence. ‘I wasn’t happy at home then,’ she said. ‘I wanted to go to college and do an art qualification. I wanted to be a
photographer.’ She made a rueful face. ‘I still think I could have made a go of it. But my parents wanted me to do teacher training. It was all rows and bad feeling. Amy and I decided we would go away together, take a gap year in Europe. We had it planned. And then when we got back we were going to share a flat in London while we were students–she wanted to be a designer and I was going to work at my photography.’ She could so easily recapture those times with their excitement and their closeness. ‘I don’t think you ever make friends again the way you do when you’re young.’

‘Did Amy know that you thought you were her sister?’

‘Not in so many words, but it was a kind of unspoken thing. She stopped talking about the family that she’d lost. And I felt as though there had been this gap in my life that I hadn’t known about, and suddenly it wasn’t there any more. Then something happened. I don’t know what it was. Amy had been a bit edgy–she could be like that–and then she said out of the blue that she had to go to London for a while. She said she’d found something out she wanted to check. She didn’t want to tell me then, but she said she’d tell me when she got back. It was like…she had this secret. She was really excited. She was…I can see her now. She was just glowing.

‘I went to the station with her, and I waved her off. I can remember she was hanging out of the window calling something to me, and I
couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was running along the platform shouting, “I can’t hear you!” and she was calling, trying to make me understand.’ The picture was as vivid in her mind now as it had been then. ‘I never saw her again.’

Joe had drawn up a chair and was sitting in front of her, leaning forward, listening intently. ‘She didn’t come back? Didn’t get in touch?’

‘She never did. I had a big row with my parents–I blamed them. I told them they’d driven her away, that Amy was my sister, and they’d done something to keep us apart. My mum was devastated. She’d had no idea…They had a kind of album they’d never shown me, something they’d been given when they adopted me. I can still see my mother holding it out to me like some kind of offering, something dangerous. I spent hours that day just looking at the photographs.’

There had been photos of her birth parents, photos of her home, photos of her when she was small.

And photos of another child.

‘That’s the irony of it. I did have a sister. Nell. She was called Nell. She was a year younger than me. And she died in the crash.’…
between the salt water and the sea sand
…

There was silence once she’d finished, then Joe said, ‘And it was her, it was your Amy, at the party tonight?’

Your Amy
. Roisin nodded. She hadn’t been hallucinating. She had seen Amy.

‘Did she recognize you?’

‘Yes. But she backed off at once. She was probably as shocked as I was.’

When Amy had gone–once she was able to admit to herself that her mother was right, that Amy was not coming back–she’d been devastated. She’d imagined terrible things: Amy lost, Amy sick, Amy dead. She’d gone to the police, but they hadn’t been interested. A young girl, an adult, with a rootless past, choosing to disappear into the restless chaos of London, was hardly an emergency.

And now here was Amy–happy and prosperous, judging from the brief glance Roisin had had. ‘I’ll have to contact her. Can you get her number?’

Joe was looking at her, still concerned, but there was something in his expression that she couldn’t quite read. ‘You haven’t had any contact with her for years,’ he said. ‘Why stir things up?’

It was as if she hadn’t heard him properly. ‘What?’

‘With Amy. Why stir it up? If I were you, I’d leave it.’

A breeze blew across the room and Damien lay for a moment with his eyes closed, savouring its freshness. He had surfaced from a dream of veils that obscured his vision as he tried to find his way through a maze of stone and marble. The atonal piping that filled the air became the early-morning
call to prayer, then he woke further and realized that what he was hearing was his phone. He swore and reached for it, his hand finding it instinctively before his eyes were open. The illuminated clock face said
04.09
, and he felt dread in the pit of his stomach. Phone calls in the dawn hours usually meant bad news.

‘Damien? It’s Amy.’

He sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wrong? Nothing. I needed to talk to you.’

A wash of exasperation flooded over him, followed by an unwelcome warmth. ‘Amy, for God’s sake–it’s four a.m. If you wanted to talk, we had plenty of time this evening.’ He’d only gone to the party because she’d asked him to, but she’d arrived late, and then been edgy and evasive, so he’d left.

‘I didn’t…I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

It sounded almost as if she was crying. She never cried. ‘Amy? What is it?’

There was silence at the other end of the phone, and when she spoke again, her voice sounded firmer. ‘Nothing. It’s just…I came across a part of my past last night. Damien, when did Roisin Gardner arrive? What’s she doing here?’

His mind tangled as he tried to make sense of what she was saying. ‘Roisin Gardner? I don’t know of a Roisin Gardner.’ Amy must be talking about Roisin Massey, but he wanted to know more about this before he gave her the information.

He heard the impatient catch in her breath.
‘Roisin whatever she’s called these days. I used to know her, years ago.’

‘Amy, is four in the morning the right time to talk about this?’

Her laugh was edgy and he heard the sound of a lighter clicking. He could hear her sigh as she exhaled. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what time it was. I was sitting up watching the moon. It’s very bright tonight. Have you seen it?’

Pale light was streaming through the ornate window screens. ‘Yes.’

‘It made me think about that night in the desert. Do you remember?’ Her voice didn’t sound calculated or seductive, it just sounded sad.

‘Of course I do.’ He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. ‘Amy, why would I forget?’

He could still hear the sadness in her voice, hear the slight shake that told him she wasn’t completely in control of her emotions. This wasn’t the Amy he knew. ‘Sometimes I hate this place,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t wait to go home. But the trouble is, I don’t know where home is any more.’

‘Where do you think of when you dream about home?’ For Damien, that was Riyadh. The other dreams, he preferred to forget.

‘England,’ she said. ‘The North East. I grew up in Newcastle.’

‘Maybe that’s where you need to go.’

‘The place I dream about?’ She laughed. ‘It doesn’t exist, not now.’

There was silence. When Amy spoke again, her voice was brisker. ‘I was curious about Roisin–we used to be good friends, more years ago than I like to admit. I let her down badly. I’ve been sitting here thinking about her. And watching the moon. I want to contact her.’

He sighed. ‘It could have waited until morning. She’s out at al-Haidah, on the north side.’

‘Miles away. And the number?’

‘I don’t have the number, but she’ll be in the book. It’s Massey, by the way. Roisin Massey.’

There was a beat of silence. ‘She’s married to Joe Massey?’

He waited.

‘OK, I’ve got that. Thank you, Damien.’

‘Goodnight, Amy.’

‘Goodnight, my love.’ She put the phone down.

…
My moment with you now is ending
…The words of the song ran through his mind. He wondered where that had come from. He didn’t want to think about Amy, but he couldn’t get her out of his head: the moon in the desert sky, her face on the pillow, flushed and warm, the feel of her body under his hands.

Amy.

He had had his life all sorted out before she came on the scene; the relationships he embarked on always carried the seeds of their own ending, relationships with women who were married, or women who were leaving the Kingdom soon, relationships where no future could be planned or
intended. He had been called heartless, he had been called a bastard, but the nature of the attachment had been on the table from the first. But with Amy…sometimes it felt as though they were both edging towards the precipice of a commitment that neither of them seemed to welcome.