Dear Laura

DEAR

LAURA

GEMMA AMOR

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dear Laura

First Edition July 2019

Cover Illustration By: Gemma Amor

Copyright © 2019 Gemma Amor

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9781797875712

For my readers, who held me up, spurred me on, and changed my life.

other books by gemma amor:

Cruel Works of Nature

TILL THE SCORE IS PAID

grief is a false god

COMING SOON:

WHITE PINES

Find out more about Gemma’s work:

gemmaamorauthor.com

‘A guilty conscience needs to confess.

A work of art is a confession.’

Albert Camus

1.

The woman with brown hair walked through the trees in a straight line, her mind’s eye fixed on a target. She walked, and checked the compass hanging around her neck after every few steps, travelling as the crow flies, feeling as if she herself were a small, tired, worn-out little bird, doggedly flying north. Migrating to a land she couldn’t see yet. It dwelt inside of her, that journey’s end. One fixed point. One reason to keep going.

Reddish-brown hair, now threaded with grey and beaded brightly with drops of rain, fell into her eyes, over and over again. Laura was continually forced to push it back from her face with cold fingers, absent-mindedly at first, and then with anger. Her hairband had broken, three miles since. She considered taking out her pocket-knife, hacking the hair off at the roots. But she could not spare the time. Soon, it would be dark. Soon, she would be walking in the forest at night. The darkness did not frighten her. What frightened her was the thought that she would not reach her destination at the designated time. And so she carried on, wiping the hair from her eyes, placing one foot in front of the other, checking the compass that thumped against her chest with each step. All that mattered to her was what lay at the end of the path. Everything else was an inconvenience, only there to be overcome.

Rain fell steadily as she moved through dense undergrowth, high-stepping over weeping fronds of bracken heavy with moisture, snagging her ankles on brambles, stumbling into tree trunks as tiredness gradually took a firm hold of her body. Water worked its way underneath the collar of her jacket and crept into the tops of her boots. Her toes squelched in sodden socks. She kept one hand free as she walked, for balance, and the other jammed hard into her left coat pocket, curled, claw-like, around something.

In that hand rested a crumpled, soggy letter. One of many she had received over the years. She thought this might be the last of them. It was pappy from rainwater, the writing blurred, ink washed away. Unreadable, now. It didn’t matter. Every word in that letter was etched into her mind, every single expression, punctuation mark, and errant, elaborate flick of pen on paper that the author was so fond of.

Specifically, there was a code in the letter, or a string of codes, shakily scrawled amongst the self-indulgent ramblings of the man who wrote to her every year, on her birthday. The codes burned into her waking vision, glowing, beckoning, a long sequence of numbers and symbols. She saw them everywhere as she walked: in the trees, in the sky, on the ground, sprouting amongst the ferns like weeds, buzzing around her head like mosquitos.

The others letters she had from the same sender had similar codes in them. She knew what they were. They were directions. And she knew what the letters were. They were admissions of guilt.

Confessions.

I did something terrible, they said.

And that, after all, was why she was here. It didn't matter if the author had a poor grasp of vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. It didn't matter if he was arrogant, and violent, and self-obsessed. It didn't even matter that he was cruel, and had been cruel for so many years, and that she was the primary focus of that cruelty throughout her life.

It only mattered that he had answers.

It only mattered that he knew where Bobby was.

It only mattered that she put an end to it all.

Laura kept on walking.

2.

The first letter arrived on Laura’s fourteenth birthday, exactly one year and a day after Bobby disappeared.

She had grown up very quickly in that year. Physically, yes, but in other ways too, more significant ways. By then, she had lost all hope that they would find Bobby alive. Coming to terms with this had a profound effect on the child that she had been, and she sped past the tumultuous awkwardness of puberty like a flat stone flung across the sea. She became, almost overnight, a quiet and serious young woman with a solid grip on the reality of her situation. Her best friend had gone, and he was never coming back. The ties that bind, she realised, did not always bind tight enough. He had slipped from her grasp. And in doing so, he had taught her a lesson, a harsh and immutable truth: that nothing is permanent. Everything can change. A life can alter beyond recognition in the time it takes to simply let go of someone’s hand.

His hand in hers was the last thing she remembered about Bobby. She still felt the ghost of his fingers on hers, every day. Hot, smooth, and awkward. Fumbling, stroking her skin. They were clumsy with each other, as teenagers are. She was thirteen, he was fifteen. He had kissed her the day before, on her birthday, lightly on the lips. And now they were ‘going steady’, as kids said in those days. And going steady meant holding hands.

They had a habit of walking to the bus stop together, and that day, which was also her birthday, had been no different. In matching school uniforms, they dawdled so they could spend more time with each other before the bus arrived. She remembered blushing, stammering as she spoke, unsure of what it was that they were supposed to say to each other now they were boyfriend and girlfriend. They had known each other for what felt like forever- their parents were old, close friends and neighbours- but this felt like new territory, and she was woefully ill-equipped to navigate it. She felt a certain hesitance from Bobby, too, as if he were also unsure as to what the rules were, now that they had begun to explore each other in different ways.

His fingers stroked her hand, and they blushed, and scuffed their feet in shared embarrassment. She wondered if he would try to kiss her again before the bus arrived, but he seemed nervous, his eyes focussed on the road beneath them, so she didn’t ask.

And then, she realised she’d forgotten something. What that thing was now, she could barely recall: a pencil-case, her homework, lunch money...it was something small and yet vital, something she would be in trouble for, if she forgot. She let go of his hand.

‘I’ll just run back,’ she’d said.

‘I’ll be five minutes, wait for me,’ she’d said.

She ran up the road, to her house, her bag thumping against her hip heavily, Bobby standing on the pavement, looking into the distance with a small frown on his pale, long face.

She would never hold his hand again.

3.

Thirty years later, Laura was lowering herself carefully down a steep, muddy embankment when her foot rolled, and she fell, heavily, arms flung up uselessly behind her, a wingless bird now, dropping like a stone mid-flight. The impact as she hit the ground at the bottom of the embankment was shattering. All breath left her body. Small sparks of bright crossed her vision, momentarily erasing the code from her sight. There was a sharp, stabbing pain in her ankle.

She lay like that for a little while, trying to suck some air back into her lungs, spread-eagled across a bed of lamb’s tongue and bird’s nest ferns and moss. The skeletal remains of long-dead trees stuck into her, behaving like old, displeased women, poking her with their sharp fingers, and all she could think was this:

If a woman falls in a forest and no one is around to hear...does she make a sound?

The uncaring rain fell, soaked into the soil next to her face. A rich, thick scent filled her nostrils: the forest, gorged on fresh rainwater, belching out a mulchy, potent aroma as the ground bloated, grew treacherous. She lay there, panting, and tried not to panic about the fading light, about the time slipping away, tried not to think about how much slower she would be now that she was injured, and all the while her ankle throbbed with fierce, shrieking pain, and she sensed that something was very, very wrong down there.

Eventually she regained enough strength to reach down with shaking hands and feel for the problem, the source of the pain. It didn’t take long to figure out: instead of flesh, she found a jagged, sharp piece of wood. It was jammed into the soft part of her ankle just above the heel, piercing the gap between her ankle bone and her Achilles tendon, right above her stiff leather boot. Blood, slippery and fresh, flooded down her foot. She wiggled the stick experimentally, and gasped. The pain was incredible, shooting up her entire leg, ricocheting off her back teeth. She knew the piece of wood needed to come out, else she would be crippled and unable to use the leg. And if she was crippled, she wouldn’t get to where she needed to be at the right time. Already the day was fading, the tree trunks around her looked less solid, and the sky sank lower to meet the ground. Her window of opportunity was closing inexorably. Time to act.

All obstacles were simply there to be overcome.

Laura clumsily shrugged out of her backpack, freeing up her sore arms. She dug around inside for her small first-aid kit, thankful that she had thought to bring it. There were other things inside the pack: a small trowel, two large bottles of water, a torch, a folded tarpaulin, energy bars, a plastic bag inside of which a bundle of letters lay, bunched tightly together with elastic bands. There was something else at the bottom, too, rolled inside an old towel, something heavy and compact, but she couldn’t think about that, now. She scrabbled through the bag’s contents and seized the hard green case with a white cross stamped on it, and then, on thinking about it, a bottle of water, and the flashlight. Basic tenets of first-aid, she thought, blearily. Act fast, keep it clean, and apply pressure. She set the items down carefully on the ground, and then reached for her pocket knife, stashed in her left trouser pocket. She unfolded the blade, switched on the torch, and gripped it between her teeth so that the light shone onto her ankle. It was not yet fully dark, but gloomy enough that she needed the extra beam of light to better see the extent of her injury. The torch revealed a sharp, dry branch from a pine tree, the type that is stripped of bark and comes to a naturally lethal point, like a stake. It stuck out of her skin at an absurd angle, almost jaunty, taunting. Her blood shone bright in the torchlight.

Laura whined and closed her eyes, fighting back nausea. As she did so, a little string of numbers swam beneath her eyelids, teasing her. You’re so close, they said, excitedly. Don’t give up now!

She carefully uncapped the lid from the bottle of water and set it to one side. Then she found antiseptic wipes and a wound dressing in the first-aid kit, and set those aside too.

Think of Bobby, she told herself, shrinking from the task at hand.

Bobby.

She leaned forward, gently seized the wood in her right hand, and carefully brought her pocket knife blade to rest against it, intending to lever it away from her ankle if she could not find the strength to yank it out.

Laura counted to ten, chomped down on the torch so hard she thought her teeth would break, squeezed her eyes shut, and pulled.

Her screams echoed around the forest, and birds, huddled together in the trees all around, took flight.

4.

When thirteen-year-old Laura returned to the bus stop, Bobby was talking to a man she didn’t know through the open window of a dark blue van that was also unfamiliar. Later, she would recognize the model as a Ford Transit, but at the time, it was just a dark blue van parked up on the curb, engine still idling. The man in the driver’s seat was talking, and Bobby was listening, and laughing, a little uncomfortable, as young people are when they are humouring adults. Bobby had been brought up well. He was a nice, polite boy. They were from a nice, polite neighbourhood.

He had to stoop, because Bobby was tall for his age, and so all she could see of him was his back, his school bag, and a tuft of his bright blonde hair. She could not see much of the man inside the van, because Bobby was in the way. But she had an idea of the size of him: he was so large, his shadow almost filled the entire front of the vehicle.

Before she could do anything, before she could call out, or catch up to them, the man gestured to Bobby, and opened the passenger side door.

Bobby threw a look at her over his shoulder, a strange, excited expression on his face. In the distance, Laura heard the school bus approach. She raised her hands, shrugging a question at him: What are you doing?

Uncertainty glimmered in his eyes. The man in the van gestured to him once more, flapping a huge hand around in a circular ‘hurry-up’ motion.

Bobby hesitated, and then did something that Laura would never understand.

He jogged around to the passenger side of the van.

And climbed in.

Laura shouted: ‘Bobby! What are you doing?!’

The door slammed shut, and Bobby kept his head turned from her, his hair curtaining down to shield her from his vision. A knife slid delicately into her heart as he shut her out, her best friend for years, her companion since babyhood, her new boyfriend of a day. Every morning for the rest of her life she would wake, and find that thin, stinging blade still there, lodged in her chest. If only she could pull it out. If only she could throw away the knife.

But Bobby sat there, in the van, staring at his knees, ignoring her, and Laura saw him mumbling, saw him issue an instruction to the man. Then, the stranger at the wheel of the blue ford transit put his foot down. The van squealed away, belching thick, black smoke from its exhaust. She didn’t think to look at the number plate, didn’t think to run after, and see where it went. She was a child, and in her world, these sorts of things didn’t happen.

The school bus arrived, came to a ponderous stop in the road beside her, hissing as the door opened on squeaky hinges. The driver shouted cheerily for her to get in.

The van disappeared from view. Laura was left behind.

And Bobby never came back.

5.

The torment of her ruined ankle was unbelievable. As soon as the stick was out of her flesh, she felt faint, and the forest spun around her head. Hot sweat rolled down her face, mingling with the rainwater. There was so much pain.

Pain is just an obstacle, she told herself eventually, through gritted teeth.

And obstacles are simply there to be overcome.

Jerkily, yanking her hand back repeatedly as the wound screamed at her, she poured cold, fresh water from her bottle over her ankle. She wondered briefly about taking off her boot first, but knew what would happen if she did: the foot would swell, and she’d never get it back on. The water rinsed away fresh gouts of blood and eventually, she could see a ragged, splinter-flecked wound. She picked out the splinters as best she could with uncooperative fingers, and then ran an antiseptic wipe across the whole mess, before placing a dressing over it and bandaging the area as tightly as she could without cutting off the circulation in her foot entire.