This is one I wrote and previously submitted under the title Amy. I deleted it from Lit because someone wanted to buy it, but since it also appears on other sites -- having been 'stolen' from Lit -- the deal fell through. So here it is again. If you haven't already read it I hope you enjoy it.
As usual I'd appreciate feedback.
GA -- Chiang Rai, Thailand -- 20th of February 2013.
From a letter dated 13th January1979:
... although I'm not evil I have committed evil, I have killed three people.
The first was out of love, the second an accident, and the third out of necessity -- or at least I considered it necessary at the time.
I just wanted to explain ...
One
THE GIRL WITH A SECRET looked intently at Billy. The expression on his face told her he'd asked on impulse, in one of those moments without logic. Despite her worries Amy felt a laugh bubble in her chest at his face, a comedy mask of disbelief. He obviously hadn't meant to offer, but once he'd asked, blurted it out really, the question hung there, floating amid the baking air of the overheated station buffet. Awkwardness ballooned between them while, in the frigid night outside, a seemingly endless goods train clack-clanked on a ponderous and lonely mission to some northern colliery.
Eventually the metronomic clangour faded, and Billy was sure the next sound would be a refusal from the girl's mouth. Who in their right mind would accept the invitation? From a stranger; an old duffer like him, and at this time of night ...
Finally the girl sniffed, cuffed impatiently at her nose and then looked around the room as though considering her options. There weren't a lot of them available. A squaddie, with a soldier's trick of snatching rest, head on his forearms and with a scuffed and battered suitcase secure between his feet and the wall slept a few tables away. A surly attendant on duty behind the counter slopped a desultory grey dish-cloth around the formica, irascible and impatient to close up shop and be away home.
And there was the man.
Behind the raisin-faced indolent steward a clock showed the time approaching one o'clock, while the calendar beside told the date -- 2nd December 1978. A day in its infancy, with dawn's light still over six hours away. For Amy the day offered guilt, worry and uncertainty. The sudden and surprising surge of euphoria when she'd first run had dissipated somewhere between Edinburgh and the Tyne, now she was alone and hunted, with eighty-five pence in her pocket and a mug of British Rail coffee on the table in front of her.
And his offer.
She studied the man opposite, the one who'd asked if she needed somewhere to stay. He sat there, rumpled and worn in his thin blue jacket, but he looked OK, didn't strike her as a weirdo; she liked the look of his face, a road-map of experiences, interesting and interested, with kindly brown eyes, while his hair could do with a trim as it curled at the collar of his shirt. Nobody you'd look at twice, ordinary and mildly unkempt, a lonely old bachelor.
She could handle him.
"Will there be owt else?" the steward interrupted from behind his waist-high counter. He wondered at their business, the grey-haired man and the girl. It was an odd to-do. The girl had been sitting there for an hour or more, a pretty one, probably trouble. It was usually the way; the pretty ones caused the grief. The older fellah had been a more recent arrival. "We shuts at one," his arm swept to encompass his nocturnal mercantile kingdom. "But if tha wants goodies or another brew after ah've gone," he continued in his laconic Yorkshire way, "there's the vending machines ovver there. An' if you've a yen for music there's yon jukebox." He thrust his bristled jaw belligerently at the pair, briefly wondered at their business again before finally deciding he didn't really care and turned to his end-of-day duties.
The girl ignored the attendant, instead she nodded. "OK," she said and then shrugged with apparent unconcern. "It's past midnight and ahm alone and ahm a wee lassie. And you, you're a complete stranger. Och, yuh could be a raving barmpot, but yuh dinae look like a nutter ..." She lifted the mug and, confronting Billy over the rim, sipped at the now tepid coffee. Grimacing at the lukewarm, muddy residue she put the mug back on the table in front of her. "How auld are you?" she asked abruptly.
Despite his years in Aberdeen Billy didn't have an ear for dialect; the girl was Scots, he recognised that, but that was about as geographically accurate as he could manage, that she was from somewhere north of Berwick-Upon-Tweed.
"Fifty-five," he answered truthfully.
"You don't look like a barmpot," the girl repeated as the attendant finally lowered the corrugated roller-shutter, clamped a robust-looking padlock through the hasp, shrugged on a thick donkey jacket and, dismissing them from his life, went out onto the deserted platform beyond the glass. His head still on his arms, the soldier stirred and muttered in his sleep. "And I'm a pretty good judge of character," the girl finished.
Minutes later, decision made, with smoking breath and toting a canvas hold-all nearly as big as herself, Amy quietly hummed as she followed Billy along the station concourse.
If yuh want muh body, an' yuh think I'm sexy
... she sang quietly to herself as Billy unlocked the car.
The heater fan in the old Allegro battled against the chill air while Billy, one hand in constant circles on the windscreen, peered through the persistently fogging glass and steered the car through the girder ribcage of Holgate Bridge towards Acomb.
The streets and roads were mostly deserted, with only two cars passing in the opposite direction. A scrawny fox crossed the road in front of them, eyes glowing eerily when the animal turned its face towards the approaching car before slinking into the green periphery of the city's edge.
A short time later the car's tyres crunched against gravel as Billy manoeuvred the vehicle between a set of ornate gateposts at the end of a long lane. He brought the Allegro to a halt and killed the engine. Amy was surprised to see the size of the place, Billy didn't look like he had much money but, as she blinked through the porthole she'd cuffed on the misted window beside her, she saw a large, imposing two-storey silhouette of Edwardian splendour palisaded by a high hedge, with sentinels of Oak and Elm guarding the gate. Her first impression was of sumptuous grandeur but, Amy noticed after stepping through the front door and the lights went on, the house wasn't as impressive as she'd first thought. It was, she compared, like its owner, threadbare and in need of care and attention. Not that Billy's domestic arrangements or the state of his home were issues high on Amy's priority list, this was temporary, one night only, in the morning ... or mid-afternoon at the latest, she'd be on her way.
Or so she thought.
Amy stood scrunched inside her parka, hands in pockets against the cold as her eyes flicked over the frayed man, while he, nervous and unsure grinned, shyly back at her.
"Could I have a bath?" she asked.
Surprised by the request, Billy paused before saying: "I'll have to turn the immersion on. It might take a bit to warm up, but you can have a bath, yes." He edged past Amy with a look of contrition on his face. "Sorry about the state of the place. I wasn't expecting ... well ..." He shrugged and grinned. "Well, you know ... a guest."
