The Other Child by Charlotte Link Page B

sick!’
    â€˜Aye, suppose so. But it might be ‘armless. Just a hopelessly uptight person somewhere on end of line, someone who don’t dare go out and would never dare talk t’ a stranger. Feels powerful when ’e makes the calls, nowt more than that.’
    She chewed her lower lip. ‘And you don’t think that it has … something to do with the stuff back then?’
    He knew at once what she meant. ‘No. Why d’you think that? That’s ages ago.’
    â€˜Yes, but … that doesn’t mean it’s over, does it?’
    â€˜Who’d phone up ‘bout that now?’
    She did not reply, but he knew her well enough to know that she was thinking of someone in particular. He could guess which name was knocking around in her head.
    â€˜Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Why now? After all these years … Aye, why now?’
    â€˜I don’t think she ever stopped hating me.’
    â€˜Is she still alive?’
    â€˜I think so. Up in Robin Hood’s Bay …’
    â€˜Don’t upset yourself,’ he warned her.
    â€˜Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied as gruffly and sharply as she could, but the hand holding her cigarette had shaken a little.
    Then she came out with what she really wanted to ask. ‘I want you to delete the emails. All the ones I wrote to you. The ones I wrote about that thing.’
    â€˜Delete? Why?’
    â€˜I think it would be safer.’
    â€˜No one can read them.’
    â€˜But Gwen uses the same computer.’
    â€˜Thought that’s why I got that thing, that password. Not any good, is it? Rubbish it is, all this computer technology … Anyroad, don’t think Gwen would nose around in me things. She’s not that interested in me.’
    For the first time in the conversation Fiona had smiled, not happily so much as wryly.
    â€˜Then you judge her wrongly, I’d say. You are second to no one in her eyes. But you never did have much of a feeling for the subtleties of human interaction. Still,’ she was serious again, ‘I’d appreciate it if you would delete the emails. I’d feel safer.’
    The computer was ready now and Chad opened his mailbox. Fiona had sent him five emails over the course of the last half year – five, that is, with an attachment. Between each of them there had come a flurry of her usual messages.
    She would write something to pep him up when the weather was bad and she feared that he was in pain; something sharper when she was annoyed that he had not been in touch for a while; something ironic when she had once again met someone they both knew and she could be nasty about the acquaintance. Sometimes she wrote about a film she had seen. Sometimes she complained about growing old. But she never mentioned old times, the past which they shared.
    Until March of this year. Then the first file arrived, along with her instructions on how to open it.
    â€˜Why?’ he had asked in his reply – nothing else, just Why , in bold italics, followed by at least ten question marks.
    Her answer had been: ‘Because I have to straighten things out for myself. I have to tell someone. And as no one else can know about it, it can only be you.’
    His reply: ‘I know it all anyway.’
    And she in turn: ‘That’s why you’re no danger.’
    Then he thought: She can’t handle it.
    He remembered asking her the previous evening what had triggered her writing it all down, all the things that no one was supposed to know, only him. Though he knew it anyway, he was not keen to be reminded of it.
    She had considered his question as she smoked, then said, ‘Maybe what triggered it was realising that my life won’t last much longer.’
    â€˜Are you ill?’
    â€˜No. But old. It can’t be too long now. No need to pretend.’
    He had read some of what she had written, but not all of it. Often he had felt it was