Dead Letters Anthology (26 page)

* * *

We became friends after that, sort of. I learned that Selena worked as the manager of an upmarket jewellery store owned by a Russian businessman who claimed to be a direct descendent of Ivan the Terrible. “He is seriously temperamental but he has a good eye,” Selena said when she told me. She smiled. I was beginning to suspect that Selena knew more about diamonds and precious metals than any amount of Russian oligarchs put together. We had nothing in common, not really, but that didn’t stop us finding plenty to talk about.

I never told her that I’d steamed open her father’s envelope. If you’re going to admit to something like that you have to do so upfront. I’d chosen not to, and so I kept quiet. I didn’t see that it mattered much anyway.

We started meeting at the coffee shop fairly regularly. We even went to the cinema now and then. About six months into this new period of our relationship, Selena told me the second half of the story she’d begun confiding to me the first time we met, namely that two years after her father died, a woman made contact with her by telephone, claiming to be Amanda.

“I met with her a few times,” Selena said. “For a long time she refused to say what had happened to her. She said she couldn’t remember. In the end she told me she’d been taken to another world. She didn’t know how she’d ended up there, or how she got back, just that there was some kind of war going on, and that whatever had caused the war was coming here.

“She seemed really upset about that for a while. Eventually she stopped talking about it. It was like she’d given up. I had no idea what to say to her. It was like Dad all over again.”

“What was she like?”

“I don’t know. Normal, I suppose, apart from the whole other planet thing. She kept on at me to let her meet Mum. I didn’t want her to – Mum had been through enough already. But she was determined and in the end there was nothing I could do to stop her. She found out Mum’s address from the Internet and just turned up there. I thought Mum would throw her out but she didn’t. She stared at her for a moment, then wrapped her up in her arms, hugged her really tight, as if she knew who she was without having to be told. The oddest thing about that was that Mum had never been a huggy person, not even when we were little. She and Amanda never got on all that well either. They were always rubbing each other up the wrong way. They were just so different, I suppose.”

“Different how?”

“Mum’s the most practical person on the face of the earth. She’ll do anything for anyone but she has no time for bullshit. Amanda’s moods got on her nerves.”

She asked me if I’d been close to my parents and I said no, not really. I preferred it that way, I could have added, but chose not to. I asked her what had happened with the Amanda woman.

“She’s still around, as far as I know. I speak to Mum on the phone now and then but we don’t really talk. Not any more.”

I wanted to ask her if she thought there was even a chance that the woman claiming to be Amanda really was her sister, but I sensed the issue was still too raw. If she wanted to tell me more, she would. It would be wrong to press her. We moved on to other subjects – her job, my research – and then we paid the bill. “Would you like to see something she wrote?” Selena said as we were about to leave. “This woman, I mean.” She reached into her handbag and drew out an envelope, a brown A5 envelope exactly like the one Raymond Rouane’s letter had arrived in. The coincidence startled me. Of course such envelopes are sold in their millions, but even so. Inside the envelope was a letter, two sheets of typed A4, folded in half to fit. There was no address at the top, just the date, a year ago, more or less.

The address on the envelope – Selena’s – had been written in loose block capitals, with a blue felt-tip.

I know you don’t believe me, but I want to tell you again anyway. I was taken from Hatchmere Lake near Warrington to the city of Fiby, which is the smallest of the six great city-states on the planet of Toshimo, a thousand light years away on the fringes of the Aw galaxy. Cally says that our peoples are related, although the ancestral links between us are shrouded in billennia. Fiby is the coldest of the cities, situated on the northern shore of the Marillienseet and the only one of the six in the southern hemisphere. I was brought to Fiby because that is where the transept lies. I don’t properly understand the laws of the transept, but I know it was created by engineers of the Lyceum in Clarimond, and that places on either side of the transept are each a perfect mirror image of the other. Hatchmere Lake is identical in every way to the Shuubseet, the slipper-shaped, forest-fringed fishing lake at the city’s eastern frontier. You could superimpose an aerial photograph of Hatchmere Lake on to a photograph of the Shuubseet and there would be no discrepancy. The volume of water from one lake would perfectly fill the other. The only difference is that the Shuubseet is far older. There are Wels catfish in Hatchmere Lake, only probably not the giant ones we used to scare ourselves with stories about when we were kids – the lake hasn’t been around for long enough. The Shuubseet is as old as the Earth itself. Older, probably.

There was a lot more, all equally outlandish. What could I say? I had no idea. There was something beautiful about it, though. There is no limit to what the human mind can invent. I wondered who she was really, this woman, and what she wanted. What con artists normally want is money, but Selena’s income was perfectly average and her mother didn’t earn a fortune either, so far as I knew.

Could she be the real Amanda? The idea seemed almost as far-fetched as what she’d written in her letter.

“What do you think?” Selena said, when I’d finished reading.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe in life on other planets.”

“We can’t know, though,” Selena said. “Not for certain.”

She’s right about that, there’s no denying it. We know as much about the universe we live in as a woodlouse under a paving stone in my back garden knows about Sierra Leone. “Are you going to see her again?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can face it. She’s got Mum now. I mostly think I’m better off leaving them to it. I’ve got my job, my house. I’m fine, really.”

We made a date for the cinema the following Saturday, and I thought what I’d often thought since meeting her: thank goodness I didn’t fancy her, not even a little bit. It’s good to have someone in your life that you can spend time with, without it landing you in trouble.

* * *

My father, Peter McConahey, was an explosives technician with the British army. You would probably refer to him as a bomb disposal expert. He loved his job, and he was brilliant at it. But the problem with a job like Dad’s is that if you cock up even slightly there’s a better than even chance that people will die. Dad was defusing a device that had been placed inside a police compound in Kuwait during the aftermath of the American bombing of Libya. A section of flooring collapsed while he was working, triggering the bomb and killing three Kuwaiti police officers and five international aid workers on the floor below. By an outrageous fluke – several hardened soldiers called it a miracle – Dad was thrown clear. Everyone including the official investigators agreed he was blameless, but that didn’t stop my father blaming himself. He killed himself on his next tour of duty, defusing a car bomb. His civilian friends were horrified, his army colleagues were saddened and greatly surprised. Dad was a career soldier, trained to deal with all eventualities. In the end though they came to terms and carried on, because what else could they do? Dad’s death could not have been predicted, or prevented. You never know how someone will react to trauma until it happens.

I was at university when it happened, here in Manchester. I didn’t tell anyone. There was a memorial service for my father, which I attended, but I let people think I was going home for a weekend visit, nothing more. That was shortly before the summer vacation, when I moved out of university accommodation and into private digs with three other women, including Anya. No doubt it was my change of address, almost at the moment of my father’s death, that meant I didn’t receive his letter until after I graduated. Someone in halls just happened to see me, and passed it on – apparently the letter had been kicking around the accommodation admin office for more than a year.

Seeing Dad’s writing on the envelope, the tense, slightly messy black handwriting that always seemed so at odds with the coolness of his outward persona, the writing I’d recognised when I opened the Lucy Davis letters and tried so hard to forget, was, as Selena had put it, like seeing a phantom. I saw from the postmark that Dad had posted it about a week before he died – too late to reach me beforehand but long enough in advance to prevent the letter being intercepted and impounded as evidence. It had slipped through the net, perhaps more completely than Dad had intended, though it was clear to me that he had planned this, as he had always planned everything, down to the last detail.

In the letter, Dad told me the story of his relationship with an army translator named Lucy Davis, how Lucy had become pregnant and given birth to a child, a little girl called Sarah.
I couldn’t be present at Sarah’s birth
, my father wrote,
which is something I regret to this day
. Dad said he loved Lucy in a way he hadn’t thought possible.
I loved your mother
, he wrote,
but we were too alike, so determined to be independent we never allowed ourselves to need each other, not properly, not even after you were born. I regret that, too.
Dad tried to persuade Lucy to be with him, but she didn’t want to be responsible for his divorce. That’s what she told him, anyway, although I suspect it was Dad she didn’t want to be responsible for. Perhaps she realised how cold he could be sometimes, unreachable as the ocean floor and just as dark.

Whatever the truth of things, it seems that what he saw as Lucy’s rejection caused Dad to lose his legendary self-control. He persuaded two of his army comrades – God knows how – to help him kidnap his daughter Sarah.
I wanted to give her a fright, that’s all
, he wrote. (He meant Lucy.)
I wanted to show her how much she needed me. She must have known I would have died rather than hurt Sarah. I was such a fool, Aileen, and I am so, so sorry.

Sarah Davis was five at the time. The soldiers kept her in an empty house on the north side of Salisbury Plain, about ten miles from the village of Tytherington and the cottage her mother rented from the army. They took it in turns to stay with her, making her sandwiches and reading her stories and watching cartoons. They were compassionate men, fathers themselves as well as soldiers. They told her it was a holiday. Was she frightened? I think she must have been. Children always know when something is wrong, no matter what they are told to the contrary by adults.

What my father hoped to achieve by this I have no idea. After five days he came to his senses and took Sarah home. He parked his car around the corner from Lucy’s cottage and told Sarah to walk down the hill. Your mother will be waiting, he said. Walk, don’t run.

But of course Sarah ran, as fast as she could. She wanted to see her mother. She wanted to get away from the tall man who’d been behaving so strangely. It was a quiet road, but even on a quiet road there will still be vehicles. Lucy saw her daughter running and dashed to meet her, afraid that in her excitement Sarah might accidentally step off the pavement. Lucy was struck by a passing car as she crossed the road. In her anxiety to get to Sarah she hadn’t even noticed it, even though, as witnesses confirmed, it was going quite slowly.

Lucy Davis was not killed, but she suffered severe head injuries, and the resulting brain damage left her unable to look after or even recognise her daughter. Sarah Davis was put in the care of social services, who quickly placed her with foster parents. Eventually her foster parents were allowed to adopt her.

My father, Peter McConahey, drove away. Neither the car driver, nor the three bystanders who rushed to the scene saw him go. Because he was parked in the next street, he never saw exactly what happened, although he did hear Lucy scream.

I have dreaded having to tell you these things
, Dad wrote.
But I thought you had the right to know you have a half-sister.

He enclosed a photograph of Sarah, the same as the one I had seen before, with the letter to Lucy. Perhaps it was the only one he had. I wondered who had returned it to him, who had been redirecting the letters, all those years ago, to our home in Salisbury. One of his comrades, still watching his back? Or someone else, an enemy who wanted Dad to understand that his secret was known, that it was only a matter of time before the truth came out.

What torture that would have been, I can only imagine. I replaced the letter and the photograph in the envelope and hid them in my desk, under a mound of papers and other detritus. I have always kept them with me, but I have never again looked at the photograph, or taken the letter out of the envelope to read it. By the time that letter reached me, it was already old news. Sarah was two years older, Dad was two years dead. I had always thought of my father in a certain way. Now I had to learn to think of him in another way. Sarah must be in her twenties now. She knows nothing of me. Whether it is best to keep things like that or not, I have no idea.

Some letters aren’t supposed to be read. Have you ever wondered if that’s why they go astray?

* * *

I think about Amanda all the time. I cannot put away the knowledge that she is out there somewhere, just across the city from me, going shopping, visiting her mother, writing letters. I would like to ask her about her alien planet and what it was like. What trouble she believes is coming, and when it might get here.

Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including
Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013
, and
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women
. Her debut novel
The Race
was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. ‘Astray’ was written while Nina was working on her second novel, which has resulted in more than a few uncanny similarities in character and theme. Nina lives and works in North Devon. Find her blog, The Spider’s House, at
www.ninaallan.co.uk