Dead Letters Anthology (25 page)

“The thing is, I haven’t had a letter from my dad in years,” Selena said. “He died in 1998.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, though I had suspected something of the sort, I don’t know why. “It must have been a shock for you. Seeing the letter, I mean.”

“Yes, it was.” I thought she would say more, tell me the reason for his death, or why he had been in a mental hospital, but she didn’t. “You asked if it was me who lost my sister,” she said instead.

“That was rude of me,” I said. “I apologise.”

“No, it’s fine. I am that Selena. I was surprised, that’s all. Most people have forgotten. It was a long time ago.”

“It was your name that made me remember. Rouane, I mean. It’s quite unusual.”

“My grandfather’s family were from Normandy, a town called Lion-sur-Mer. He died before I was born but Dad used to spend holidays there when he was a kid. I think that’s why Amanda got so interested in France.”

“People always want to know where they’re from, don’t they? Did she ever go there?”

“She wanted to. She started collecting all these old postcards. And she was doing a Linguaphone course. She borrowed it from the library.”

“You don’t think…”

“Dad did. He tried to get the police interested, to get the French police involved and everything, but there wasn’t any evidence, so they refused. Dad went to France on his own in the end. I don’t think he found out anything. Mainly he just drove around. Driving was the one thing that settled his mind. At least it did for a while.”

There was so much I wanted to ask her. About her father and Amanda’s diary, about Amanda herself. I forced myself to keep silent. I knew if I sounded too interested, too eager, Selena would probably clam up. She would put down the phone and never speak to me again. The important thing was that contact had been established. She wouldn’t find it so strange now if I contacted her again. I couldn’t, at that moment, think of an adequate reason for doing so, but I felt sure I could come up with something, given time.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said again. I thought it would be better to make it seem as if it was I who wanted to end the conversation.

“Thanks. And thanks again for posting on the letter.” There was a catch in her voice, as if she was searching for an excuse to prolong the call. I don’t know. Perhaps I imagined it.

“No problem. Take care, then.”

“Goodbye.”

I waited until I heard the click at her end, then lowered the receiver into the cradle.

* * *

I looked up Lion-sur-Mer online. A small, picturesque town on the Normandy coast: sandy beaches, historic castle, cobbled streets and pavement cafés. Not exactly a typical setting for adolescent rebellion. Whichever scenario you cared to imagine – religious cult, serial killer, dodgy boyfriend (or girlfriend) – you would have imagined it playing out in Manchester, rather than a sleepy resort town like Lion-sur-Mer. Who gets themselves murdered on the Normandy coast, outside of a low-budget horror movie, that is? How would Amanda even have got there in the first place? She was seventeen, so it was unlikely she would have had an independent passport. There was also the question of money. According to Raymond Rouane, Amanda didn’t even have a bank account.

There was a theory going around at the time, that Amanda had hitched a ride with the murderer and sexual predator Steven Jimson, who was nicknamed the Barbershop Butcher on account of the logo – Barbershop Plumbing – on the side of his van. Jimson ran a tin-pot illegal courier operation, ferrying packages of cannabis and knocked-off stereos and occasionally exotic reptiles all over Europe. He also used his van as a mobile murder venue. Jimson was from Stockport originally, but he had friends in Warrington and was often in the area. He was apprehended in the November of 1994, initially for a stolen passport, although as the team investigating soon discovered, that was just the beginning. For the first two months of 1995, media interest in the Amanda Rouane case spiked again as speculation mounted and the newspapers vied with each other for a lead on the news they all now saw as inevitable: that Amanda had been the Butcher’s final victim.

That news never came, though. Steven Jimson contended that he’d never spoken to Amanda, never so much as laid eyes on her, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise. The Barbershop Butcher was sentenced to life imprisonment for three counts of murder and five counts of aggravated sexual assault, but Amanda Rouane was still missing and no one was any the wiser about what had happened to her.

I googled ‘Lion-sur-Mer murder’ and then ‘Lion-sur-Mer Rouane’, scrolled rapidly through a large number of articles without really finding anything. There had been a murder in Lion-sur-Mer in 2009, when a man shot his brother with a hunting rifle in the car park of a local brasserie, the culmination of a dispute over property that had been smouldering intermittently for twenty years. There were also Rouanes in Lion-sur-Mer, though none of them seemed to be connected with the property murder. Berenice Rouane was some sort of local government official. Marcel Rouane ran a computer consultancy business. Jeanne Rouane was a freelance photographer. Her website had a page listing her more recent exhibitions, as well as a gallery of photographs, which seemed to be mainly of derelict buildings and abandoned construction sites. The photograph on the ‘About’ page showed a woman whose appearance struck me initially as being so similar to Amanda’s I almost closed the window by mistake. As I examined the image more closely I saw I’d been wrong about that; Jeanne Rouane bore a surface likeness to Amanda but that was all it was: surface, a family resemblance maybe, but nothing more.

I wished I’d thought to ask Selena for her email address, so I could send her the link. I wondered if the photo of the French photographer constituted enough of an excuse for me to call her, and decided it wasn’t. If I was sensible I’d admit it was time to forget the whole thing.

Instead, I thought about the defunct Walsey hospital, the many hundreds of keepsakes and letters and postcards they must have had to dispose of when the place closed down. Boxes of them, probably, letters that had been written to or from ex-patients who were now either dead or recovered or absconded, living ‘in the community’ or lapsed so far into delusion they were different people. Letters that never arrived or were never sent.

I thought about the dead letters of the dead, the thousands of miniature worlds and paper castles, guarded secrets and confided dreams and ancient enmities. Letters burning on bonfires and forgotten in attics, mouldering in landfill or kept guiltily in a suitcase under the bed, eventually destroyed by an indifferent grandchild when the owner of the suitcase, also, gave up the ghost.

* * *

It was Selena who phoned me, in the end. “I know this must sound weird, but could we meet up?”

I took a few moments to answer, as I knew I should. “What’s this about?”

“I looked you up on Google,” Selena said. “I found that article about your dad and how he died.

“I just wanted to tell you that I understand. That I know what it’s like to lose a father. I don’t mean just generally, I mean when he’s not… when he’s not how he was.”

* * *

Selena looks older than she did in the photographs. I don’t just mean that she has aged – we have all done that. I mean she looks at ease with herself – at ease in her own body – in a way the snapshots of a pretty schoolgirl never hinted at. Her clothes – a closely fitting trouser suit and jersey top – are unobtrusive but flawlessly right for her. The ring she wears, a ruby, is especially stunning. She barely resembles Amanda at all now, and yet I feel convinced that if it were Amanda sitting opposite me in the café she would still look exactly as she did in all those old news photos: unmade and slightly scruffy, not properly of the world she was forced to inhabit.

She wouldn’t hesitate with her words the way Selena does, either, not because she’s more articulate but because she wouldn’t be embarrassed and wondering what the hell she’d been thinking of, asking a perfect stranger to meet her for coffee.

I made sure to get there first, so as to be already seated when Selena arrived. I didn’t want the whole of our meeting to be influenced by her inevitably faulty perception of my disability.

Disability! What a weasel word that is, and how I hate it. I was in a car accident. My girlfriend Anya was driving. My spine was injured. The upshot is that I can only be on my feet for about fifteen minutes before excruciating pain sets in. I sometimes have to use a wheelchair, but not too often. The doctors seem to agree that neither the effects of the injury nor the pain will get any worse, which makes me pretty lucky, all outcomes considered. Anya died at the scene, as the saying goes, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like telling you what that actually entailed.

The cafe I suggested to Selena as our meeting place is just about the only venue that is close enough for me to feel confident of walking there and back without folding up on the pavement. Luckily the coffee is so good here it’s almost criminal.

“What you mean is that my father went mad and blew himself up. Shit happens.”

I can see she’s blushing. “I wouldn’t say mad.”

“Wouldn’t you? I would.” I am about to start reeling off my litany of synonyms – crazy, barking, insane, batshit, mental, loonytunes, marble-deficient (there are plenty more; believe me, I’ve made lists); all those mordant-ugly-beautiful words I start spouting when I’m feeling defensive, or angry, or when I simply want whoever I’m talking to to shut-the-Jesus-fuck– up – when I remember that Selena is not just a bystander. Her father was in the Walsey. She probably knows the list of m-words as well as I do.

“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s a rare admission, though she can’t know that yet. We are barely acquainted.

“Don’t worry. I get it.” She sips at her coffee, holding the cup between her hands in a manner that seems oddly out of keeping with her elegant appearance, a gesture that belongs to an earlier part of her life, when she sat side by side with Amanda on the living-room carpet drinking a mug of Horlicks and watching
Black Beauty
or
Dick Turpin
or
Tales of the Unexpected.

There are parts of us that can never be eradicated. Not by ourselves, not by the world either.

“Dad lost track of himself after Amanda disappeared,” Selena says. “At first it was just small things – never being able to miss a news bulletin, all that driving around he did. But in the end everything mounted up and he collapsed. The doctors said it was simple exhaustion, but Mum and I both knew it was more than that. You can’t avoid knowing, can you? Not when you live with someone. He was supposed to be in the Walsey for a couple of weeks at the most – to give him a rest, the doctors said. To recharge his batteries.”

“But they kept him in?”

Selena nods. “Mum and Dad had split up by then and Dad was too ill to manage by himself. And to be honest he seemed happier there, more stable. Less overwhelmed by things. Perhaps I’m kidding myself.”

I don’t answer. She hasn’t come to me for platitudes. “His whole life became about finding her. Amanda, I mean. He refused to even consider the possibility that she was dead. He had a room at Mum’s, you know, for when he came to visit, and it ended up crammed to the ceiling with all this stuff he was hoarding. Newspaper articles, magazine clippings, anything he could find about missing people and unsolved crimes. He couldn’t let go.”

“What did the doctors say?”

“They said that until he learned to accept that Amanda was gone, he would never be well again. Dad wasn’t having any of it. He said that what they told you in hospitals and schools was a form of brainwashing, that the people in authority wanted you to accept their version of things because it was more convenient. For them, I mean. If you carried on believing something they didn’t want you to believe, they said you were mad.”

Well, he had a point, I think but don’t say. I sense that Selena is eager to ask me about my own father. That’s what this meeting is about for her, isn’t it? Swapping stories? Comparing experiences? Tallying up the points to see whose dad was maddest? Her questions are so rankly present I can almost smell them. Imagine her disappointment if I were to tell her that no, Dad didn’t go off the rails, not until that final second when he put his decision into practice, and even the decision itself would have been carefully arrived at. There were no outlandish, glorious delusions, no gradual slide into lunacy. He made a mistake, that’s all. A bad one, granted. The guilt must have cannibalised his brain like cancer. But no one knew what he was going through, least of all me. An army man till the end, that was my father.

“My father was tired, I think. He let things get to him.” This is a part of the truth at least, and I think Selena must realise this, because she nods to herself, just slightly, and then carries on speaking.

“Dad became obsessed with Hatchmere Lake. The police spent a lot of time searching around there. At the start, anyway. They didn’t find anything, but Dad kept on at them, he wouldn’t let up. He had this theory that Amanda had been abducted by aliens. He got the idea from Amanda’s diary. She’d written something in there about someone called Cally, and a city of white buildings on the edge of a lake. The police were fairly certain that Cally was just Amanda’s code name for Allison Gifford – that was the teacher she was friends with – but Dad wouldn’t have it. He called the Detective Inspector an idiot, right to his face.”

I have to hand it to her. In the mad dad delusion rankings alien abduction has to be the winner.

“Why do you think he thought it was aliens?” I am genuinely curious.

“Goodness knows. Because she’d just vanished, I suppose. There was nothing else, no other explanation that made sense. Not that aliens made sense.” She laughed. “It was strange, though, even for Dad. He was never into UFOs before.”

“How did he die?”

“Heart attack. He was sixty-five. The hospital said his body was worn out, basically.”

“You must miss him.”

“I do,” Selena says. “I really do.”

There are tears in her eyes, and I find myself wondering if it is not just her father she is mourning, but the possibility he seemed to offer, that her sister was still alive somewhere, and that the universe was not so small as everyone insisted.