I sighed happily.
From then on, in private, he refers to me as Ms Limit.
Katie tries to sit up, perhaps moved by my sombre mood, and I can see her wince. This has been her third, and hopefully last, bout of surgery.
‘How did the birthday go?’
‘It was all right,’ she says. She looks down at the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your divorce.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you… OK?’ Her dark eyes are guarded, will probably always be guarded now, but there is that flicker of kindness in them.
‘Yes. He’s a wanker, so I’m better off not married to him.’
She nods, relieved. This is also her opinion.
Ours is a deeply strange relationship. Margot, or more properly Mrs Lewis, was her teacher, the authority figure. Bethan is her comrade-in-arms, the only other person in the world who knows what it was like, who survived the cellar. But Bethan is fractured and frequently missing. For all her youth, Katie has more mental strength than Bethan ever did. In that sense, she leads me, and not the other way around.
And in leading me, she leads herself.
‘It was dreadful, what he did to you. Saying all that stuff to the papers…’
I shrug. ‘You know, it doesn’t make him less of an arse, but in a way I’m glad.’
She looks sharply at me, her smooth brow bent into a slight frown.
‘It was exhausting, living a lie, never trusting anyone, always terrified I’d be discovered. And it gave me excuses – reasons to not examine why I didn’t have a normal, joined-up life, why I never stayed in touch with anyone. I always knew something was very, very wrong with me, I just never dared look too closely at why.’ I sigh. ‘This way I’m forced to confront who I was. What I did to the real Margot.’
She visibly double-takes. ‘There was a real Margot? I don’t understand. I thought it was a name you made up.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t make her up.’
My psychiatrist is a clean-cut thirty-something called Yufeng. It was he that I was finally referred to once Katie and I were wheeled out of the Grove in that ambulance, the doctor that Greta was trying to call on that last mad day that I became Bethan Avery again.
I get the impression he’s quite senior at the hospital, a hotshot with a growing international reputation, and that I’m something of a coup for him. He very kindly, after he was assigned to me, asked me if I would prefer a woman, and I told him no, I was good with this if he was. We get on – I can make him laugh from time to time despite himself – which makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
Together we embark on the course of drug-induced trances and psychotherapy my recovery requires. He tapes these sessions, and we listen to them together; I hear my own voice in the echoing acoustics of the digital recording, and don’t know it. It is Bethan Avery’s voice.
I was right to pick him in spite of gender empathy, as it turns out, because though the therapy has been exhausting and turbulent he has proved to be an unshakeable guide.
I told him that I am not that interested in recovering what happened with Christopher Meeks all those years ago, unless it is of material aid to the on-going police investigation.
‘You’re not?’ asks Yufeng, his hands steepled together, his focus in action. ‘Why not?’
‘I have always been much less interested in Christopher Meeks than he has been in me, and I see no reason for that to change. He’s going to get the full life tariff, isn’t he? I mean, they found those girls buried in the garden. He’s never coming out, right?’
‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Yufeng.
I offered him a little twist of a smile. ‘Well, then.’
‘You don’t want to know why he did those things? You’re not curious?’
My eyes narrowed, and I could almost feel him retreat, as though he had taken a psychic step backward. The shadow of my old rage lay over me.
But just for a moment. Then it was gone, like clouds passing over the face of the sun.
‘Yufeng,’ I said. ‘I already know everything about him that I’ll ever need. What I want to know now is, how did I become Margot?’
Some things I do not yet remember, and I have to take on faith. I remember escaping the Grove now, but very little else has come back spontaneously or even under hypnosis, and I have been told to expect that most of it may never.
They found evidence that I tried to make a reverse charge call to my grandmother’s house, and the new tenants – I’d been gone for two months by this time – told me she was dead. I do not recall this.
There was a coach journey to London Victoria. I don’t know how I got the clothes or money. I don’t remember losing the nightdress.
But incredibly enough, there is a record that these things happened.
It is forty seconds of CCTV footage that has survived by accident – linked to another case.
It’s Victoria Coach Station in jerky black and white.
The grainy film shows a young girl, with a slightly halting, stiff gait – perhaps she’s been cramped in the coach, or perhaps she’s recovering from some kind of fight – certainly she’s been injured. She wears a dirty dark hoodie and loose, ill-fitting pants. Despite the cold March evening she is clad in cheap flip-flops. She has no bag. She crosses the empty bus lanes with the other passengers to reach the concourse, where the camera is, in jolting stop-motion, and as she grows nearer my heart starts to hammer.
The small gaggle of pedestrians slow, as the ones with luggage mount the kerb. At the back, the girl, who has been glancing carefully all around herself, raises her head and spots the camera.
I stop breathing. I can see the dark eyes, the haunted expression. Though her nose is swollen and misshapen, badly broken, and her bottom lip is dark where it’s been split, I see Bethan Avery. But for the first time, I can also see me inside her.
On the last night I am out with Angelique, I tell Yufeng in my drug-drenched trance, we are somewhere out in Canary Wharf in the ruins of Docklands. Angelique is looking for this ex of hers who owes her some money. We find him, and some manner of exchange takes place under the pillars of South Quay DLR, the details of which she is very hazy about, but it involves her disappearing and leaving me alone for the best part of two hours, while I hide on a bench, partly concealed from the street by scaffolding. In fact, when she returns she is still very hazy, with that dead-eyed glaze that she wears more and more often.
I am furious and frightened because we are very likely going to miss the curfew and my bed will be given away for the night. The thought fills me with a thudding dread. What if I never get it back, and am stuck out here for ever with Angelique, in her London full of junkies and squats, unexplained favours and needle marks? This is a very real danger, as because I have no legal ID, the nuns cannot forward me on to social services as is their usual process if you stay longer than ten days. There is the real possibility that their patience will run out with me, particularly if I am regularly truant from my bed.
But I cannot tell them that I am Bethan Avery. Not now, not ever.
We need to get back before curfew, and she is making us late.
The DLR, however, is shut for repairs. We will have to walk to Canary Wharf proper. The night nips us with cold and we have no coats.
We are moving past a deserted, boarded-up house when I feel her slow.
‘Come on,’ I snap.
‘Can’t we stop for a minute?’ Her eyes drift towards the house.
‘No! We’re going to lose our beds for the night.’
‘Go on, Amy.’ This is what she calls me. It’s the false name I gave at the shelter.
‘No,’ I say coldly.
She doesn’t reply, instead voting with her feet, drifting off towards the semi-boarded door.