Dear Laura

by Gemma Amor

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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

Pain is just an obstacle, she told herself eventually, through gritted teeth. And obstacles are simply there to be overcome.

She could retrace her steps, get herself to a hospital, forget about the letters and the codes, and go back to her life knowing that she tried, at least. I tried, Bobby. I really did. But then, the knife would still be there, every day, twisting in her heart, always. And more than anything, she wanted to wake up and feel safe again. Safe, and whole. No. She needed to finish this.

They worked hard to maintain the life they’d built around themselves, forgetting, in the process, what that life was really supposed to be about.

The envelope was handwritten. No postage stamp. Definitely not the postman, if she’d been in any doubt. The postman didn't deliver mail without postage stamps.

She stumbled repeatedly, root snarls and barbed loops of blackberry bushes lurking everywhere, and wondered why it was that she couldn’t cry, like normal people. Had she in fact died, years ago? Was she now just a ghost, a memory of a girl in pain, drifting, endlessly drifting, towards something indistinct?

What if there was no Bobby at the end of this rainbow? What if the person she was supposed to meet didn’t show? She stopped, overwhelmed by a squeezing fist of dread, and doubt. What if he did? And what if, because of that, she died out here, alone in the forest? The trees bowed their heads, whispering gently. Don’t stop, they said. She walked.

Dear Laura, You don’t know me yet, but I know you. I’ve been watching you. I know you, and I know your friend Bobby. I know where Bobby is. Laura put a hand to her mouth. The letter continued: Bobby is dead.

I’m sorry for it. I couldn’t help it. I expect you’d like me to tell you where he is. I expect you think I’ll do it out of the goodness of my heart, or because I feel guilty. I am sorry for what I did. But I don’t trust you well enough yet to tell you my secrets, not yet. You have to earn my trust. So here’s how it works, Laura. If you want Bobby, you have to give me something first. Something personal. If you do as I ask, I will send you a clue. Something for something, an eye for an eye, all natural and fair, just like nature intended. Do you see? It has to be fair. That’s the rule. Like a game. I know you like games, Laura. I watch you playing them sometimes with your family. I think you are very beautiful, Laura. Has anyone told you that, yet? I hope not. I would like to be the first to say it. You are beautiful. Sometimes I watch you and all I can think about after is your sweet face. There is another rule I must tell you about. This one is easy. If you take this letter to the Police you will never find Bobby’s body. This has to be our secret, or the arrangement is off. No Police. I hope I can trust you, Laura. I shall send further instructions separately. Yours with respect, X.

Sometimes, all you could do was give in. Sometimes, you just had to let the night win. Lose the battle, win the war,

Despite there being no body, no burial, and no specific mention of the word ‘death’, the service still had all the uncomfortable, itchy trappings of a funeral.

She would do whatever the mystery man wanted, if it meant that she could find answers to it all. She was not too young to understand what closure meant. She was not too young to feel the agony of not-knowing.

She waited, and disappointment became another rock to carry, a rock painted a different colour, but a rock the same size and weight as the rocks she already bore: those smeared with the colours of guilt, and grief, and shame.

There was little point in fighting the dark: it comes for everyone, in the end. Better to accept this, and work harder when the light returned.

Dear Laura, Did you miss me? I missed you. You are never far from my thoughts, you and Bobby. There are so many things I want to say to you, but I am afraid to out of fear for what might happen to me. I could get into trouble for writing letters to a fifteen year old girl. Society judges people with feelings like mine.

The letters came like clockwork after that, once a year, on her birthday. Clues piled up, locations, symbols, possible places that Bobby could be.

Every year X demanded something else of hers in exchange for these clues, something she had used: a lock of her hair, her favourite t-shirt, a piece of paper with a lipstick kiss on it, even a dirty sanitary pad. She gave him these things wearily, having been conditioned to obey, thinking with every letter that she would go to the Police, and then telling herself that doing so would jeopardise the only real connection she still had with Bobby.

Laura kept wrapping little, intimate parts of herself up in plastic, and leaving them outside her front door, like donations to a perverted god.

Was the man who wrote the letters really the same man that had driven away with Bobby? Did she actually believe that the end result of this sordid letter-writing campaign would lead her to the remains of her dead best friend? Or had she pushed herself to believe it so that she could make peace with her own complicity?

I won, she thought. All I had to do was stop playing. But she was wrong.

She slipped the second photo out from behind the first with her thumb, and screamed. ​Bobby wasn’t smiling anymore. His eyes were rolled back in his head, unseeing. ​And the rest was all red. ​Red. ​So. Much. Red.

I was upset by your letter, Laura. The one you wrote when you moved out. Did you think I wouldn’t follow you? That is not how this works. You don’t get to write the letters, because I’m the one that has what you want. You don’t get to tell me what to do. Only I get to make the rules.

She continued reading, a cold sheen of sweat collecting on her brow. A tooth, said the letter. A big tooth, a molar. Give me what I want, and I’ll give you a clue. Deep down inside, you know you can’t live without me, don’t you? And I can’t live without you for much longer, Laura. If you don’t do as I say, I’m not sure I can hold myself back. No cheating. I’ll know if it’s not your tooth. Yours with respect, X

This was no longer about Bobby. Maybe it never really had been. This was about her, and him.

It’s only a tooth, Laura, she told herself. Only a tooth. She went to fetch a hammer and a pair of pliers from the toolbox she kept under her sink. She downed a cheap bottle of wine. Took a hold of her right back molar with the pliers. Pulled, hard.

Laura broke her relationship off four days later. A parting of ways had been brewing for a while, anyway, largely due to her own fear of intimacy. And she realised that she just couldn’t bear to let anyone else into the sad, desperate triangle that was Bobby, X and her.

She was mystery wrapped in silence, and sometimes, unwrapping the secret just wasn’t worth the struggle.

Later, it transpired that Frank had been in a car accident, as a child. He’d struggled with anxiety ever since. Laura took this information, and thought about swapping it for her own story, the story of Bobby, and the letters, and X, and the codes, and her missing back molar. But she didn’t. Even when they married, she didn’t. Even when, red-faced and roaring, she pushed out her beautiful baby boy, and called him Robert, and marvelled at his white-blonde hair. Still, she said nothing.

‘The worst thing,’ the article concluded, ‘is not knowing what happened to Bobby. It’s the not knowing.’

Inside the envelope were two things. A letter, with a string of coordinates. This was par for the course, with X. And a cloth badge, which was not. On it was embroidered a school insignia. The thread was worn and furry, the colours bleached, but she knew instantly what it was. It was her old school insignia. There was a shield, with a tree growing behind, and two rabbits entwined around the base. The badge had been cut from a dark green woollen sweater. The same type of sweater that both she and Bobby had been wearing on the day he climbed into the van. The badge was also spattered with a dark, rusty brown substance that she knew, without question, was blood. Bobby’s blood.

Dear Laura By now, you are forty-four years old. I remember that age. I was near that age when I first met Bobby, and first saw you. Now I am an old man, and time has not been good to me. I am sorry I didn’t write before. I was put away for something I did. Locked up like an animal, by people who don’t understand what real feelings are. People don’t know love, not the way I do. Society judges me instead. I couldn’t write from prison. I couldn’t risk them finding out about Bobby. He is our secret, isn’t he? So I stopped writing, for his sake. It was agony for me. But I thought about you every day, Laura. Every single day.

Because once a secret has grown old, and burrowed itself like a tick under the skin, it is harder to dig out than she could fathom.

She’d never taken a step back from it, like this, and looked at the letters all together, as a complete entity. She’d only ever treated each one as an individual step towards downfall, but now…now, here on her bed, was a finished jigsaw puzzle. A portrait of a man. What kind of man? A criminal, she knew that now. A repeat offender? Most likely a paedophile, too, which is something she had never openly admitted to herself until now. What a shame you had to grow up, he’d said.

She realised now, with the advent of maturity and the wisdom that parenthood had afforded her, that X had manipulated her from a young age. He had preyed upon her guilt and confusion, and twisted her fear around his strange declarations of love for herself, and for Bobby. And Laura had bought into this fantasy narrative, bought a map, gone on bus journeys, smashed a hammer into her own mouth and pulled a tooth for him, even written back. All grist for his sordid mill. Laura had been the object of X’s desire for all these years, not Bobby. Laura. Laura. And here he was again, still trying to write their story.

Because the knife still twisted, in rare quiet moments where she found herself without a task. All these years later, it twisted, and she felt the ghost of Bobby’s hand upon hers. Her

She walked, and with every step she took, she felt taller, and colder, and more rigid, as if she were one of the very trees themselves, uprooted, marching to war. And then, she found it. The place she’d been searching for. Thirty years of her life, spent looking.

This was his home, his turf, his front door. And this was where she would find Bobby.

Quid pro quo, you suffer, I suffer,

‘Do you want to see my scars?’ He said, lifting his shirt up and showing off his pigeon chest. His gut protruded out from beneath it like a swollen, ridiculous tumour. She saw pale, shiny marks criss-crossing the skin between his nipples, and then she realised the scars were arranged in the form of letters, a crude inscription that someone had carved onto his body: PAEDO, it read. ‘They don’t like people like me in prison,’

He was still playing the game, and the game wouldn’t be done until she was broken, because that was what he had decided to make his life about. There was no Bobby, there was no end, only him, and her, until he died, and let her be, and even then she would dream of this moment, she knew it.

the gun might not have been loaded, but it was heavy, and solid, and she brought it down on X’s face, as hard as she could, and kept bringing it down, until he was no longer smiling, until his own rotten teeth had smashed and splintered, until she felt his nose crunch under the butt of the gun, and all she could think was quid pro quo, over and over, until she was spent.

And something else, sticking out amongst the roots of the tree, lopsided, crude, and weathered. A wooden cross. Upon it, a name, painted in faded blue. Bobby.

There was bone, barely concealed under a thin layer of soil. It was a shallower grave than she had imagined it would be. It stuck out from the broken ground, white against dark, jagged, broken edges pointing skyward. Laura kept digging with the trowel she had packed especially for this purpose, not content with one, single bone. I need all of you, she thought. Every single piece. I want it all back. All of it. Each part of you.

Let him choke, she thought, distantly, let him choke and I will not have murdered him. And when he is dead, I will bury him here under this tree, and the forest can have him.

Then, they searched Stanley’s tent. And found Bobby. Or, what was left of him, at least. His skull. Sitting on an old tapestry cushion balanced on top of a folding camp table, garlanded with a crown of ferns and moss. A large, worn, laminated photo of him was propped up behind. Candle stubs had congealed around its base in a large, molten mess.