"MISS" Fortune?"

The desk clerk cocked an eyebrow and smirked.

Julia sighed. Her name was a joke every stranger thought he was the first to get. But as the clerk scrawled her name on the registration card, Julia realised this would be the last time the joke would be on her.

"Room 1710," he said handing her the key, "top floor."

A Christmas tree stood between the elevators. It was the only concession the Hotel Diplomat had made to the season. It was an artificial tree. Spindly, white, three-legged, it looked like it had succumbed to some wasting disease. The silver baubles on it were frosted with white, bits of which had shed like dandruff on the grubby red carpet.

The tilt doors opened and Julia stepped in, dragging her bag behind her. Her reflection in the lift, mirror looked grey, spectral, half-dead. Yet under the glare of fluorescence she felt twitchy, as if she were giving off static. After all the contraptions she had gone through at the airport, she firmly believed that as soon as she jabbed one of the lift buttons an alarm would go off or a red light would flash over her head and give her away. But after several false starts the lift lumbered into action. It stopped several times unbidden. The doors opened clamorously but there was nobody there.

She could have been in a ghost-hotel except that when she finally alighted and wandered through the dingy corridors on the 17th floor she could hear from other rooms the tinny babble of television and the mournful clatter of plates.

Room 1710 felt very used. It was dowdy - yellowing walls, a brown carpet. When she switched on the bedside light it gave off a tobacco-coloured glow. The bed was cloaked in an evil pink nylon bedspread. The tiny bathroom was painted in toothpaste-green, speckled here and there with spores of mould. The perfect place to end it all, Julia thought.

There was a large window with a French door set into it which opened out on to a balcony. After a lot of tugging, Julia worked it free and stepped out into the glorious thrum of a frosty New York twilight. She leaned over the parapet: far below, a lighted centipede of traffic snailed towards a vanishing point between the glow-worm skyscrapers. The melancholy toot of car horns played a symphony; the diva sirens wailed. On the building opposite an electronic tickertape mouthed a silent red greeting "Merry Xmas 1985". She inhaled deeply. She wanted to savour everything. This would be Julia Fortune's last Christmas.

She shivered and retreated into the musty warmth of Room 1710. She turned on the television, a large, old-fashioned black-and-white model. She kept the sound low. There was a quiz show on and every so often as she moved around the room unpacking her bag she glimpsed people on the screen caught in poses of constipated glee. Hetty's mother had told her once the contestants were auditioned not for their general knowledge but for their ability to "do" hysteria. Mrs Gardner had spoken fondly of America, or so Julia had thought. It was only in retrospect Julia realised she was being ironic.

THERE was a knock on the door. Julia jumped. Who could it be? Who knew she was here? Cautiously, she inched the door open. A very tall black woman stood outside. Her hair clustered in little rolls around her ears and she wore glasses with elaborate wings that swept upwards like encrusted extensions of her eyebrows. She bent forward deferentially as if, by folding herself up, she could negate her great height. She must be six foot, Julia estimated. Her large feet were carelessly pushed into carpet slippers; she was wearing a dressing gown over her day clothes.

"Hi, honey!" she said smiling broadly. "Gloria, 1709."

She pointed at the next room. The door was ajar. Julia caught sight of a miniature winking Christmas tree and heard waves of TV laughter from an unseen set.

"I thought I'd be neighbourly."

Julia smiled tightly.

"You just shipped in, then?" Gloria asked, peering beyond Julia at the spilled contents of her bag on the bed.

Julia nodded.

"I thought maybe you'd like to join me for a little celebration."

Julia looked at her blankly.

"I like to have my neighbours in at Christmas."

Inwardly, Julia groaned. Even here, in this huge anonymous city, it was not possible to be left alone. And just now, Julia wanted to be very anonymous.

"Thank you," Julia said,"but I have plans for tomorrow."

"We all got plans for tomorrow, honey."

Julia felt reprimanded.

"I'm talking about tonight. My place, 9.p.m." Gloria smiled munificently and Julia felt instantly forgiven.

"You Irish?"

"Yes," she admitted though she had sworn to herself she would say nothing.

"Well, honey, you get back to your settling in." She backed away a few paces. "You just holler if you need anything."

Julia collapsed on the bed, her heart still pounding with fright. She had had too many brushes with authority today. Firstly, there was the form-filling on the plane. Reason for trip - business or pleasure? Pleasure, she wrote. And it was true, in part. She was finally yielding to a long-held fantasy. And there was relief in it, if not pleasure.

Then there was the long queue at immigration which had snaked slowly and inexorably to the glass booths where officials consulted long lists of figures, each one identifying an undesirable of some sort. Having been allowed through, she must be positively desirable. Instead, she felt guilty and sad, the brief bout of euphoria on the balcony replaced by a numbing tiredness. She lay on the bed fully-clothed and slipped into a fitful drowse.

HETTY appeared in her troubled sleep. Her dreams of Hetty were always in monochrome the images steeped in grainy family-album hues. Hetty had been her childhood pal (so inadequate; Julia wanted to use the word sweetheart). Hetty was a self-possessed child, impulsive, quick. She had always been in charge of their friendship. But then, as Mrs Fortune never tired of pointing out, Julia was easily led.

Julia remembered when the Gardners moved in next door and Hetty, aged seven, stood pertly at the other side of the garden wall and declared: "I'm your new neighbour, Henrietta Gardner but my friends call me Hetty." She had seen Hetty already. She had watched her playing on the swing in the garden, Mr Gardner pushing her from behind Mrs Gardner clapping her hands as Hetty flew higher and higher in the air.

Bob and Jean Gardner were a handsome couple. He was a stocky, sporty man, his rusty hair and bleached good looks gave him a wholesome, commanding air. Like a sea captain or a whaler. Julia thought he would look good in a uniform which was ironic since he had come to Ireland to dodge the draft. Mrs Gardner was a slight but exacting woman. Her hair was tied back in a pert pony tail; she wore windcheaters and jeans. Her features were sharp, her candour interrogative.

"Who's this little citizen?" she had asked when Hetty had brought her into the house that first day. "Name, rank and serial number!"

"Don't mind Mom," Hetty had confided, "she's a bit kooky."

Julia had yearned to belong to the Gardners. Or rather, she had longed to possess them. Over the years she scavenged for biographical information. Bob was from South Bend, Indiana; Jean from Newport, Rhode Island. Julia looked these places up in an atlas; she wanted to be sure they existed. The Gardners had met at college. It was love at first sight, Hetty informed her gravely. What about you, she had asked. Julia had no idea. As far as she was concerned she had sprung from some dark mood of her father's and a blind eye turned by her mother. Julia was the baby of the family, the final disappointment, the last gasp for the Fortune name.

Five well-spaced daughters had exhausted her father's ambitions for a son. Her mother compensated by trying to curb their high spirits as if the communal exuberance of five girls in the house was the ultimate insult to her father's manhood. A gaggle of geese, he called them.

Julia envied Hetty her parents. Their vigour, their youth. They entered into Hetty's play as if they were enjoying a second childhood. And yet when the three of them took to cavorting round the living-room in a cushion fight or some other rowdy horse-play, Julia would step back, disapproving, wary. A surfeit of gaiety was not to be trusted. And somebody should be in charge. "They haven't known hardship," her mother said as if that explained everything.

Julia's mother did not like the Gardners. They were too casual, too direct for her liking.

"You're spending a lot of time round there," she would say to Julia, "are you hoping some of their Yankiness will rub off on you?" Yes, Julia wanted to say fiercely, yes.

"I don't know why they're such a big hit," Mr Fortune complained mildly. "Sure isn't he on the run?"

It was this very danger that made the Gardners so attractive, and Julia so fearful. One day she might knock on their door and be greeted by silence. She would peer through the letter box and see only a shaft of hazy light falling in an abandoned hallway. Such things happened. She and Hetty watched The Fugitive.

JULIA awoke, startled, not knowing where she was. There was a racket in her head. She rubbed her temples to get rid of it, then realised the knocking was at her door.

Rumpled, she rose from the bed and padded to the door. It was Gloria again.

"You ready then?"

She had changed into a cherry-coloured satin dress and she was wearing a party hat. She sipped from a pale green cocktail with a cherry floating on the top.

"You don't want to miss my Japanese slippers!"

Julia allowed herself to be led into Gloria's room. If her own room felt used, Gloria's was possessed. Every available space had been utilised. There were two heaving bookshelves, a cabinet hosting a family of glittery glassware, a table pushed under the window. Her sofa was a foldaway bed. As well as the Christmas tree Julia had seen earlier, there were streamers and balloons hanging from the light fittings and golden paper chains draped over the picture frames. Gloria raised a jug and poured Julia a large cocktail. She handed her a blue paper hat.

"Come on, come on," she exhorted Julia, "it's Christmas. Don't they celebrate Christmas where you come from?"

Julia donned the jester's crown and sat on the sofa as she was bid. Gloria busied herself in a corner choosing a record to play on an ancient-looking gramaphone. A crackly Frank Sinatra disc boomed triumphantly.

"I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps..."

I want to sleep, Julia thought, in a city that never wakes.

"You look done in," Gloria said.

"Jet lag."

"You flew in from Ireland today?"

Julia nodded.

"Say, I don't know your name, Gloria said. "Here we are having a seasonal drink and I don't even know your name.

Julia took a deep breath. Here goes.

"Henrietta," she said. "Henrietta Gardner. But most people call me Hetty."

She helped herself to a large gulp of Japanese Slipper. Her eyes stung from too much alcohol and a sudden overdose of memory. From somewhere deep within she could feel a wail rising, an unstoppable ambush of grief. As if Hetty had just died, as if she had just killed her. As if she had desecrated the grave, torn the coffin lid away, trampled on the remains. She stood up, dropping her glass. Gloria rushed to the bathroom and came back with a cloth. She righted the glass and began to mop up the lime-green stain which was spreading on her pale rug. Julia watched and sobbed.

"Hetty, honey, what is it? What's troubling you?" Gloria was still on her knees gazing up at her.

"My friend died."

There, it was said. Three little words.

Gloria stretched up her hand and grasped Julia's.

"Why don't you sit down and tell me all about it?"

ON Christmas Eve 14 years before, Hetty had cycled to the shops on an errand for her mother. It was drizzling and foggy and almost dark. Hetty had taken a short cut, cycling down the steep hill near the old railway embankment. Every child in the neighbourhood had been warned to dismount there. But Hetty hadn't. A stone must have bounced against the spokes or maybe she hit a pothole. She must have been travelling at quite a speed hurtling down the forbidden bill. She applied the brakes. The cable snapped. She was pitched forward over the handle-bars, striking her head on the stone balustrade of the bridge before falling some 20 feet to the disused tracks below. Stone-dead, Julia's mother said. But Julia could only bear to think of Hetty at the moment of impact, her body in flight, still intact, still joyous and alive. (Not face down on the tracks, her skull smashed and stones crushed in her eyes.)

Julia had never got over it. She was ashamed to admit she was 27 and knew no-one who could compete with the captivation of a dead 13-year-old playmate.

The Gardners had abandoned her.

"It's nothing personal," Bob Gardner explained to Julia's mother, "it's just too painful for Jean. Every time she sees Julia she's going to think of Hetty. Maybe after a while.

But time only solidified Hetty's absence. The milestones in Julia's life - her first boyfriend, leaving school, going to college, getting a job - these emphasised the cruel distance that had grown between her and the Gardners. Hetty's death had left them stranded but it had banished Julia to a kind of comparative limbo. Bob could manage a bluff hello on the street and a cheery, deflective wave. But Jean was relentlessly unforgiving; she would not even make eye-contact. It made Julia feel as if she were the one who had died and had returned as a ghost, a shadow of her former self.

IT was almost midnight before she stumbled out of Gloria's room.

"I'm sorry for the mess," she said. She meant the tears, the confessions, the awful mess of intimacy.

"It's nothing, honey. I've spent my whole life cleaning up after people. It's my job." She contemplated the damp patch on her rug. "Anyway, that'll come out in the wash."

Back in her room, Julia peeled her clothes off, letting them, lie where they landed. She climbed into bed. She reached out and groped in the drawer of the bedside locker where she had stowed her travel documents. She put her old passport to one side; she would not be needing that again. There was a small, slim package wrapped in gay green and red paper - holly boughs and berries. It was a present to herself. She tore away the wrapping paper. Inside there was a brand new, unused, American passport. She opened it. Her own face greeted her. She had managed a smile for the occasion in deference to Hetty who would certainly have said cheese for the camera. She traced her fingers along her new signature. Henrietta Gardner.

Hetty was eligible for American citizenship. Like any good friend, Julia had simply arranged it for, her. She had got Hetty's birth certificate and applied for a passport in her name. Hetty had been too young to have left any official trace. She had been too young to die so no one in authority had even considered the possibility. And who was better qualified to impersonate Hetty Gardner? They had been inseparable, after all.

Here in a hotel bedroom in New York, Julia Fortune was going to be put out of her misery. She was trading her past for a pristine present. Tomorrow she would wake up, a new woman.

"Happy Christmas," she whispered into the darkness. "Happy Christmas, Hetty Gardner."