The Second Life of Amy Archer

  Copyright

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books.

  This ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books.

  Copyright © R.S. Pateman 2013

  The right of R.S. Pateman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book, except for those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Photo of Durning Library © John Hoyland

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 2855 7

  Orion Books

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Notes

  A Note from the Author

  In conversation with R.S. Pateman

  The Landscape of The Second Life of Amy Archer

  Questions for Discussion

  Further Reading Suggestions from R.S. Pateman

  For Mum, Sue and Ellie

  &

  Elsie P

  who said it would be so

  1

  Sometimes I see her in the roundabout’s blur. Hear a giggle in the squeak of the slide. But she’s not really there, of course. Nor are the slide or the swings.

  The council have ripped out the rickety see-saw and roundabout and replaced them with more modern playground equipment: a bucket swing, gyroscope, fountain and sand pit, traversed by platforms and zip wires. For safe but adventurous play.

  They’ve moved the site of the playground too, shunting it to the other side of the park so it’s close to the café. Parents now chat and drink cappuccinos as their children dangle, dig and spin.

  But I have been robbed of the last place Amy was ever seen.

  The old playground, the one Amy knew and loved, has been swallowed by smooth tarmac and marked out as courts for umpteen different ball sports. Lines and circles criss-cross the tarmac, like a dropped geometry set.

  No one seems to know what the courts are for; I’ve never seen them being used. Not for sports, anyway. Today is no different.

  Beneath a buckled, net-less hoop, a gang of boys smoke, their heads bowed over mobile phones. They look up as I get closer to the fence. I grip the bouquet in my hand tighter. The cellophane rustles.

  I avoid the boys’ stares as I bend down to lean the flowers against the glossy blue railings. They’re new too, straighter than the previous ones. Stronger too, I hope, capable of keeping children in.

  I take off my gloves and adjust the card on the flowers. For my darling girl. Forgive me. Love always, Mum xxx.

  I clasp my hands together and dip my head. My words are misted by the chilled air, little puffs of prayer that evaporate into nothing, just as Amy did.

  I stand up, using the railings for support, and pull my gloves on. I wonder if the park staff will clear the flowers away tomorrow morning, like they did last year. Maybe they won’t even last that long.

  The bouquets I’ve seen attached to lampposts, marking the scene of fatal road accidents, remain until the stems are withered and the cellophane around them is shredded and grey. They are as much road safety warnings as acts of remembrance. My bouquet is no different, although the danger it warns of is stealthier than a speeding car and trickier for parents to explain.

  At the end of the path I stop and look back. If I’d been here to turn around and look, ten years ago today, keeping watch, like a mother should . . .

  One of the gang gives a sarcastic wave. The others laugh and mutter. The flowers will probably be kicked around before I’m even out of the park, or lobbed through the basketball hoops, the petals making the tarmac’s geometry even more hectic.

  Cold bites at my face. Frost ghosts the branches of the plane trees and makes a glistening web of the nets on the tennis courts. The clock on St Mark’s church chimes ten.

  I have an hour before my appointment, enough time for a coffee – but not in the park’s café. I can’t bear to walk past the playground, let alone sit in earshot of the children’s squeals and squabbles. The scrapes and grazes, the tears and hugs that heal. That is intolerable even on an ordinary day, and today is no ordinary day.

  I pull my coat up around my neck and walk towards the park gates.

  The receptionist looks up as I open the door. She must be new; I haven’t seen her before. Her smile is quick and efficient.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Beth Archer,’ I say, unbuttoning my coat. ‘I have an appointment at eleven.’

  Her eyes drop to the diary on her desk. Ragged fingernails drag down the list of handwritten names.

  ‘Ah, yes. Eleven o’clock with Ian Poynton.’ She smiles again. ‘He’s our new boy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know.’

  I’ve been dubious about seeing Ian. The picture on the website shows a boyish face framed by a schoolboy haircut. He looks too young to be qualified to do anything, let alone speak with the dead.

  My doubts over his credentials feed a creeping scepticism that has dogged my annual visit over the last few years. I’ve shut it out because I want to believe Amy will come through to me. But I also want my hope in psychics to be proved right as much as I want – need – Brian’s cynicism to be wrong.

  I made my husband come with me the very first time I went, soon after Amy first went missing.

  ‘If not for my sake, then for Amy’s,’ I said. ‘She’s your daughter too.’

  He sat outside the room, huffing and puffing, tapping his foot on the floor, muttering about it all being a waste of time, a con. He was no better once we got inside, and refused to shake the hand of the tiny, white-haired old woman who ushered us into the room.

  She introduced herself as Edna Hussey and asked us to close our hands in silent prayer as she summoned her spirit guide, Akara. Brian snorted but loosely linked his fingers.

  ‘I’m not getting anything. Except a sense of resistance,’ Edna said.

  She screwed her eyes up in concentration and fiddled with the hearing aid in her left ear. Brian suggested that she change the battery. When she failed to deliver anything conclusive, he sneered that she should change the frequency too.

  ‘That will get it working as efficiently as my bullshit detector,’ he said, and walked out.

  I muttered a quick apology and hurried after him. But I made another appointment for the following week. And the month after that. Every month, in fact, for a year.

  ‘If psychics ha
d loyalty cards, you’d have enough air miles to fly around the world,’ Brian would say. ‘I wonder if their air miles can only be redeemed for astral flying?’

  He said it was just holding me back, preventing me from moving on. My counsellor took the same line.

  But I can’t give up on Amy, not altogether. I let her down once before and she paid with her life, although of course her body has yet to be found. I’m not going to let her down again. If she tries to reach me from the other side, I have to be there.

  If there is any one day when Amy’s voice is more likely to be heard, it would be the anniversary of her disappearance, so I promised Brian I would cut back my visits and only go once a year.

  ‘It’s still one time too many,’ he said. ‘Just when you’re starting to heal, you pick at the scab and open the wound again. I never had you down as a masochist.’

  ‘I never had you down as a sadist.’

  ‘I’m not hurting you, Beth.’

  ‘You are if you don’t let me go.’

  I didn’t need his permission. I could have gone without him even knowing. But the secrecy would only have made it feel grubby and sordid – as if I was doing something to be ashamed of. And I needed Brian to accept that it was part of my grieving process, even if he couldn’t approve of it. My annual appointment was a grudging compromise that ate away at our marriage. One of them, anyway.

  Over the years I’ve seen a succession of psychics. The pudgy man whose body odour soured the small room; a flint-eyed Scot who wore the same blouse and skirt whatever the weather; a former miner, breathless from nicotine and coal dust. Each of them gave me something: vague exhortations to go to America, a warning about my back or needing an eye test, jokes about doing too much housework. All of which had a kernel of truth, or seemed to have, at some point.

  But none of them made contact with Amy.

  ‘They haven’t even got the decency to lie,’ Brian said, as he tapped at his laptop on the kitchen table. ‘Well, lie even more than they already are about being psychic.’ He shook his head. ‘They must know who you are and why you’re there. All they need to do is say Amy’s fine and is watching over you and sends her love. But they can’t even do that. Or won’t.’ He sniggered. ‘Fortune. Teller. They’re well named. Counting cash doesn’t have quite the same ring.’

  ‘It’s because they don’t lie that I keep going back,’ I said. ‘You’re right, they could easily tell me what I want to hear, build a reputation on it, but they don’t. Why?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Integrity.’

  Brian chuckled.

  ‘From a psychic? Don’t make me laugh.’ He stood up and kissed me in the centre of my forehead, where my ‘third eye’ should be. ‘Beth, the only thing they see coming is you. But as you seem to think it helps . . .’

  It did. And it still does, although I don’t know why. Whatever it is, I keep going back, a compulsive gambler who needs one more throw of the dice that might, just might, be the one that wins the jackpot.

  Even though my faith is dwindling, I hope Ian succeeds. According to his biography on the website, his approach is modern and fresh. Maybe that’s what Amy needs.

  Let her be here today. Let her speak. Help me hear her.

  The receptionist tells me to wait outside room twelve.

  ‘It’s just up the stairs,’ she says, ‘just—’

  ‘Thank you. I know the way.’

  She gives another quick smile and I turn and climb the stairs. Other people don’t come back as often as I do, I think. Maybe they don’t hear what they want either and have got wise to the ruse quicker than I have.

  The white paint of the narrow corridor is scuffed by shoe and elbow marks – mostly mine, probably – and the thinning carpet is grubby. The chairs outside each of the rooms are empty, the doors closed.

  A sign outside room twelve says there’s a sitting in progress and asks not to be interrupted. Another sign instructs passers-by to be quiet.

  The door opens and a young woman steps out, eyes bright and energised. She loops a scarf around her neck and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

  ‘Thanks again,’ she says over her shoulder, and closes the door. ‘He said to give him a few minutes before you go in.’

  I nod.

  ‘He’s very good,’ she whispers. ‘He got that I was pregnant right away. A boy, he said.’

  She screws her face up in delight. I do my best to smile my congratulations.

  My eyes drop to her belly. It is flat, inscrutable. It could have just been a lucky guess, but guess or not, he’s got it right. The fact of it anyway; the detail has yet to be proved.

  The woman walks away, her step light. I envy her certainty, her confidence that what she’s heard is true. I resent the fact that she’s been told something meaningful at all.

  The door opens quickly, startling me.

  ‘Sorry!’ he says. ‘Didn’t mean to make you jump. Come on in.’

  He stands back to let me pass. He’s shorter than I thought he’d be, but his eyes are as blue as they were in his picture – a glacial blue, one eye set slightly higher than the other, refracting his gaze. If any eyes can see into heaven, his can.

  ‘I’m Ian, the newbie,’ he says, sitting down at a small table and waving me towards a chair on the other side. ‘Have you been here before?’

  I nod.

  ‘So you know how this works? About—’

  ‘There are no guarantees. I know.’

  My tone sounds defeated, even to me. It must sound suspicious to him, as if I’m daring him to prove that he can really do it. And I suppose I am.

  Somewhere inside me I sense the shadow of doubt darken. It isn’t personal; it is not his clairvoyance I doubt as such, but the possibility of communion with the dead, full stop.

  I twitch with irritation, angry at Brian, at Ian, at my own circumspection. Angry that, even now, I’m still hoping I’m wrong.

  Ian pulls his chair in closer. His face is flawless, its skin smooth and waxy; only the faintest of lines appear when he smiles. He reminds me of a choirboy; even his voice is suitably musical. I reach into my handbag and take out my portable cassette recorder.

  Ian smiles.

  ‘I haven’t seen one of those for a while,’ he says. ‘Most people use the digital recorders now.’

  I feel old and out of touch. Vulnerable.

  He leans towards me. ‘Are you all set?’

  I nod, and he takes my hand.

  His approach isn’t new, just more direct. Who’s Arthur? Who’s thinking of getting a new car? Why am I being shown a bunch of heather? I sense he’s fishing and I have no answers to fit neatly on his hook.

  ‘Will you take it anyway?’ he says, after I give each question a shrug. Even his catchphrase is more direct than the psychics I’ve seen before. They just say ‘I’ll leave it with you’, or ‘Maybe its meaning will come to you later.’ Ian demands a response, my participation, as though he needs the reassurance. Each time he asks if I will take it, I answer with a shrug.

  He coughs and closes his eyes. His breathing is deep and deliberate. Then he changes tack and talks of darkness lifting, of escaping quicksand, of problems bursting like bubbles, all delivered in a gentle, chiming tone.

  He sees a ‘For Sale’ sign, alerts me to an important turning point in the spring but doesn’t specify what it is or which year, and nags me to take more supplements to help with my apparently feeble joints.

  I stop listening, nod when his tone implies I should respond and sneak a look at my watch. When he asks if I have any particular questions or issues I want help with, I say no, like I always do. He is here to interpret, not for me to prompt. He must lead for me to believe.

  ‘Was that all right?’ he asks when our thirty minutes are up. ‘Helpful?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, switching off the cassette recorder and slipping it back into my bag.

  He opens the door, smiles, says he hopes to maybe see me again. As I pass, he pu
ts a hand on my shoulder. His head is tilted to one side and he’s staring at a corner of the ceiling in a strange, unfocused way.

  ‘She’s close,’ he says. ‘The little girl. Close.’

  The ground seems to buckle beneath me. I’ve waited so long for something – anything – that I could link to Amy. Now it’s here I’m flushed with surprise and relief; I feel vindicated in my persistence, glad that I haven’t let Amy down once again. But there is something else too: fear.

  Before, I was scared she wouldn’t come through to me. Now, I’m afraid of what she might say, of learning the truth.

  I put my hand against the door for support.

  ‘Who?’ I say breathlessly.

  He screws his eyes up, tilts his head the other way, tuning in.

  ‘I’m being shown an E,’ he says. ‘No, wait . . . There are two of them. A capital E and a small one.’ He nods and opens his eyes. ‘Sorry. It’s gone. Eleanor? Elizabeth? Ellie, maybe? Will you take it anyway?’

  He looks anxious, as if he needs to get something right, not for my sake, but for his.

  Only he’s got it wrong. If he’d given me an A instead of an E, I’d have taken it and insisted we continue the reading. But he hasn’t even got one letter right. Disappointment snuffs out my flickering faith.

  The smile from the receptionist is snide and knowing. As I close the door behind me, I know I will never come back here again.

  Outside, the air is brittle cold. I breathe it in deeply, feel giddy from its chill and purge.

  At home, there’s a message from Jill on the answerphone, reminding me of her New Year’s ‘gathering’ later on.

  ‘Nothing fancy,’ she says. ‘Just a few friends, some bits from M and S and a couple of bottles of bubbly. I know you prefer to stay in. I understand why. But, well, if you fancy a change – a break – you’re more than welcome.’

  I delete the message. I cannot face a party, informal or otherwise. I have my own New Year’s Eve ritual: flowers at the playground, a sitting with a psychic, a bout of furious housework and sobs so loud they drown out the midnight booms and bangs from the celebrations along the Thames. Doing anything else is unthinkable to me and disrespectful to Amy.

  I pick up the phone and dial Brian’s number, my call yet another part of my vigil. He answers within three rings.