I DIDN’T know then that I was “clever”. Who does at 14? But most of us were smart enough to stay on the right side of Amy Conway. Tall, thin, bleach-blonde hair, Doc Martens and a green parka, she broke the school uniform rules, as if even the teachers were scared of her! We lived in fear of Amy calling a fight on us. She was hard, the toughest girl in school. That was her legend, her power. 

Some kids have it, an aura, and you could say that’s what drew others to her, why she walked down the school drive with a crowd flowing around her. My friends and I kept a safe distance until we fell out – my friends, I mean, not Amy – she didn’t even know I existed – but you know how teenage friendships can be: best friends and then we weren’t. 

Mags was lonely too, and we became best mates. We tramped through the cold streets at lunchtime to the shop where Mags bought her sandwich; mum made mine. When Mags passed someone she knew she’d say: “Orraight!” I’d just nod and smile - I was with Mags - her greeting came from both of us. 

Mags fancied Birdy, in the year above. She thought he was cute. Sometimes he talked to us, to Mags, mainly; she knew what to say. I could see why she liked him; he had a nice smile. That’s how I’ll remember him. He died, stabbed in a fight during the half-term break, while I was staying with my auntie in Wales. It was strange to see our school gates on the national news, to think that’s where he died. Strange to hear his real name and realise I knew him, the boy Mags fancied. Birdy.

Grief was eloquent in cigarette smoke. Woodbines, the surreptitious singlies sold in the sandwich shop and smoked outside it. Amy looked at me, not with scorn. Something I said, and she listened. She was not always hard.

Amy was the first person I saw drunk; Amy and her mate, Sandy, in the youth club. I didn’t know then what drunk was; they were hilarious! They were laughing and it looked like a good way to be happy.

“Cider,” said Mags.

“In the youth club?”

“No! From ‘t Traff. They go there first. They serve you there. Just have to wear enough eye-liner.” Mags’ fair lashes were heavy black. 

I had often looked down on the pub from the top deck of the school bus. The Trafalgar. A battle. I knew that from a skipping rhyme. Sometimes they had fights, Mags told me, the bearded men in black leathers. Bikers. Hell’s Angels; their jackets said so. The music was louder than anything I’d ever heard. It seemed exciting, dangerous.

“Amy’s dad beats her with a belt,” Mags told me one day as we followed her usual crowd out of school. We walked on, bonded in silent compassion. The vision of a huge man terrorising a small girl cast its buckle onto the hook of Mags’ sentence. One of my grandfathers had a stick, the other walked out on his sons. My dad walked around the house with a chammy leather, singing and wiping frost from inside the windows.

In fourth year, mum and dad gave me the “we never had a chance of education; don’t waste yours” talk, instilled with the sadness of their lost chances. Mags was off school again for weeks, so I got back in with my old friends, got my head down and worked. Teachers were pleased with me which made me like school and I passed my O levels well enough to stay on to sixth form. Mags, Amy, Sandy and nearly everyone I knew left at 16. There were plenty of jobs in the factories and mills.

After A Levels I lived in France for a year then returned to start university. In the summer, the factories took on students to pack boxes. Although we all looked the same in our overalls and hats, the skilled jobs went to the permanent workers who were good fun and kind. 

We took fag breaks in a small room fogged blue with smoke and gossip. 

“Got a light?” asked a woman sitting on the bench opposite. I took my lighter from my overall pocket and passed it to her. “I know you,” she said, exhaling smoke and returning my lighter. “I remember you from school.”

“Amy? Amy Conway?”

“As was. Name’s changed. Married. I remember you. You were orraight.”

Orraight! It meant a lot, even years later, that single vernacular adjective of approval. 

“You stay on?” she asked, sucking hard on her cigarette.

“Yeah,” I replied, our exhaled smoke weaving together.

She was pretty, her soft brown hair escaping the grip of the white regulation hat. Pretty was not a word I would have used to describe her in school.

“A lot has changed since school.” She exhaled words of weary wisdom on a carpet of smoke. “I left. Got pregnant. One then another straight after. Married. You?”

“Not yet.” Who would want to be married at our age? I wanted to reply. With kids? My life flashed up in colour: so much to learn, to read, to write; a world to travel; people to meet. The real me was beneath the overall I would hand back in a month. 

“I only started here today. Me ‘usband got sent down. GBH. Is why I need this job. Me mam minds the kids.” Amy inhaled. Her cigarette glowed angrily. “You a student?”

“Yeah,” I said, putting out my cigarette in the bowl full of dog-ends. “Newcastle, my second year.”

“I was no good at school, me. Teachers ‘ated me. What you doing there, like?”

“French.”

“Never been out o ‘t’ town, me. What’s Newky like?” Amy reached across to the ashtray and found a space to stub out the butt of her cigarette. 

“I love it.”

“Lend us a light?” she asked, taking a single cigarette from her overall pocket.

My fingers brushed the rough skin of her knuckles. The flicker of flame united us. She inhaled and closed her eyes to feel the sharp stab of tobacco in the throat, the pain you can control. The flick of leather divided us. I had never forgotten Mags’ words about Amy’s father. 

Amy glanced up at the clock and expertly nipped the half-smoked cigarette. “Better get back,” she said, fear in her eyes. 

“Is that the time already?” I said, knowing that losing a summer job would be embarrassing, but not the end of the world.

*

I run my teaspoon around the cappuccino froth. My 20-year-old son, home from his study year in France, sits opposite me, his shy smile like mine used to be. We are discussing the French subjunctive mood and bat examples across the table to each other: “If only he had been kind to her... If only she had been shown love... If only justice could prevail... If only there were equality... Had we but world enough and time…”

I see her, beyond the cafe window, with a pram, her mouth pulling deeply on a cigarette. She sees me, Amy Conway, as was. I hope I haven’t been staring too hard. 

Outside, she greets me. “I recognised you,” she says. “You ‘aven’t changed.”

Her dyed black hair makes her seem young, but her skin is tired, as if too weary to cling to the bones of her face. Her mouth has the tracks of a smoker’s pucker; her once-blue eyes that might have longed to be tender are hardened to steely grey. 

“I’ll catch you up,” I nod to my son.

“You’re a nana too?” she asks, jiggling the pram.

“Not yet. He’s my son.” He is too young, with so much still to learn, a world to travel and people to meet.  

I smile at the child in the pram. “Your grandson?”

“Me grand-daughter’s bairn,” she nods indifferently, her shoulders bowed forward from the weight of life she has carried.

“Good to see you again, Amy. Thanks for letting on.”

The child is crying. “Stop yer whingeing, or you’ll ge’ a slap!” she says, more from habit than with intention.

My son is waiting a few shop windows away. “Who was that old woman?” he asks. 

“Someone I knew at school. We were in the same year.”

“Never!”

I catch a reflection of myself in the mirrored glass: tall in high-heeled boots, slim in my green Barbour, hairdresser-blonde.

I bow my head into the soft rain and wonder how, in the same year in this very town, Amy and I were given our names. Amy. Aimée. Beloved. For me that is true. Je suis aimée. I have been loved; I am loved, and I love. 

There must have been love for her once, my namesake. I will write our name as the title of a story. She was never one to hold a pen.  
          
Julie Lamin is an author, poet and teacher living in Merseyside. As an international activist and NEU member, solidarity with Latin America inspires and informs much of her writing. Her Creative Writing courses promote self-expression, confidence and well-being. She posts weekly articles on Substack: Julie Lamin-Write With Me