Someone to Watch Over Me (7 page)

‘Yes' she said, ‘I'm looking forward to it.'

He gave a kind of crinkly smile that Carrie thought sourly had probably launched a thousand girls into his bed, but to which she was totally impervious. Despite his nice shoulders and long fingers the man was a phoney, from his ever-so-slightly crumpled shirt, to his trustworthy brogues.

Carrie spent all morning serving customers and she was pleased by the positive comments they made about the shop. She was helping a small boy who was buying his mum a present and couldn't decide between a lace-trimmed umbrella or a photo frame studded around the edge with sequins, when Jen walked in, laden with bags.

‘Finished!' she shouted with her usual exuberance. ‘I've done every last bit. Even my pesky brother!'

Jen's brother Paul, who was coming back for Christmas between spells abroad, was probably the hardest person to buy presents for in the whole world, not because he had everything, but because he had nothing. Carrie had been to his house years ago and Jen had laughingly showed her the inside of his kitchen cupboard, which contained one small milk pan and a battered tin plate. He was very clever in the astronomical field and had his eyes firmly fixed on the stars rather than material possessions. It was hard to tell the difference between the academics who roamed the town muttering under their breath, and the fully certified loons. Carrie thought that often they were one and the same. She was in any case very grateful to Jen's brother who had gone off to an observatory in Chile for months of painstaking work on the spaces between galaxies, and lent Jen his house. Needless to say, the kitchen cupboards were now full to bursting, mostly with spoils from
Trove
.

After Damian had moved out, Carrie had sealed herself in her house and refused to either go out or let anyone in. Once a week, she would go and get basic provisions, but the rest of the time she lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, or she sat in Charlie's room that was exactly as it had been the morning he had left it. Her boss at the small publishing company where she had worked for five years kept her job open for three months, but then was forced to fill her post because it was clear that she wasn't coming back.

Carrie's mother finally penetrated the barricade and insisted that she attend a bereavement support group. Carrie went just to shut her mother up, and although it helped a bit, she found that hearing about other people's sadness didn't lessen her own; it simply made her feel as if there was no escape from misery. It saturated every area of life. It lurked behind the ordinary curtains of ordinary houses. It was etched into the lines around people's mouths. She made a few friends from the group and she remained in touch with them, particularly a man called Peter Fletcher whose son and wife had been killed in a road accident. She still met up with Peter from time to time, whenever the need to go over familiar ground became necessary for either of them. She found that sometimes she still needed to talk to someone who understood the specific pain of losing a child. Who knew the incredulity a parent feels when a child dies before they do. Bereaved people have a high tolerance for listening to other bereaved people's stories again and again because they know that by listening they would earn their turn to examine and re-examine. They talked about small things; how long it had been between each breath, the way his head had turned at the end, last conversations about shopping or bins or the cat, the exact time of death. They talked about the details so that their loss could be absorbed slowly. They let it in, little by little, in an attempt to control the pain and stop it from engulfing them.

The only thing that really kept her going during this period was her search for Charlie. It seemed that despite continual pressure from her, the police had stopped doing anything useful. The nice police person who had rubbed her hands on the beach that morning was sent round to tell her that they were almost certain that Charlie must have drowned. When she said the words, she looked carefully over the top of Carrie's head as if looking at something in the distance and her mouth went very small, as if recalling an unpleasant taste. Carrie refused to give up. She returned again and again to the Norfolk villages and towns near the beach. She walked the streets, showing people Charlie's photograph and asking them if they had seen him. She put up posters on hundreds of lampposts. She started a website and a campaign to raise money to find him. She persuaded the local police to do a reconstruction of his disappearance, which went out on
Crimewatch
on the first anniversary of his death. During the filming, she stood in the same weather and with the same sea in front of her and watched another little boy in yellow shorts run away from her towards the horizon and her heart broke all over again. There were the usual crackpots who rang in to say that Charlie was with Jesus or with their ex-husband or even that he had gone swimming with dolphins, but there were no proper leads. It seemed impossible to Carrie that someone who had been as loved and cherished as Charlie could have disappeared without a trace, like a shaken Etch A Sketch.

Jen was the only person brave enough to suggest an event of remembrance. A funeral was out of the question of course, but she said tentatively that perhaps Carrie would find it helpful to have a memorial or celebration of her son's life. The first time Jen suggested it to her, Carrie reacted with fury and insisted that Jen leave her house straight away.

‘He's not dead,' she sobbed. ‘I'm his mother, I'd know if he was dead, wouldn't I?' She didn't talk to Jen for a fortnight and then rang her up and apologised.

‘I'm sorry. I know you just want to make me feel better, but I can't give up on him.' It was only when she was persuaded by some other members of her bereavement group that perhaps she might view the event as a kind of vigil, that she changed her mind.

‘I think it would be nice for people to be able to just think about him and tell stories about what he's like,' Carrie said and Jen's heart hurt at the firm use of the present tense.

Thirty close friends and family members met up at the beach one chilly April morning. No one else was there except for a few bird watchers, their chests bristling with binoculars, and they had the whole expanse of sand and sky to mourn him. Carrie stood frozen and dry-eyed, watching the waves furl and unfurl and remembering the feel of him inside her, rocked in her water.

The memorial on the beach marked some sort of turning point for Carrie. She understood for the first time that she had a choice. She could die without him or she could live without him and she needed to work out which she was going to do. She had kept some sleeping pills that had been given to her by her doctor in the weeks after Charlie went. She got the bottle out of her bathroom cabinet when the night seemed particularly long or when memory hit her like a wave, knocking her off her feet and sucking her under. There were times, when if she had believed that dying would enable her to see him again, she would have done it in a heartbeat.

Jen didn't pretend to understand; in fact she often said the wrong thing because there wasn't a combination of words anywhere that would do justice to what had happened. But she was there when Carrie raged against the poem by Henry Scott Holland called ‘Death Is Nothing at All',
which had been sent to her by a well-intentioned relative.

‘Of course he's not slipped away to the next fucking room. If he was in the next fucking room there wouldn't be a fucking problem would there?'

When Carrie finally decided the time had come to go through Charlie's things, it was Jen who helped her to sort everything into boxes to save or give away. She held her friend when the discovery of a Mother's Day card tucked between recipe books on the shelf made her scratch her own face. On the second anniversary of his disappearance she remained sober whilst Carrie drank vodka after vodka whilst clutching Charlie's jacket.

The two of them had thought about the possibility of opening a shop together years ago, but the suggestion in those days was only one of many. There was also the fantasy Bed and Breakfast project, which was to cater exclusively to broken-hearted women. Perched in a harbour in a Cornish village and painted the hue of clotted cream, this establishment was to be staffed by a team of young men with surfboard stomachs, dressed in cut-off denims. Each room was going to contain a mini fridge stocked with jumbo-sized tubs of ice cream and the price of the room would include complimentary beauty treatments and salsa dancing lessons. Another of their great ideas was the fantasy School of Chocolate project. This unlikely academy was a cerise-coloured chalet in the Swiss Alps. The students, footsore from the slopes, but chic in their Chanel ski wear, would learn how to transform the rich dark stuff into elaborate confections. Carrie and Jen would, of course, be in charge of mixing and tasting and if there was anything left, wrapping the end product in the finest tissue paper and placing it in heart-shaped boxes lined with purple velvet.

When Jen resurrected the idea of the shop, Carrie saw it as a chance for a new focus in her life. Since Charlie had gone, she had simply existed from day to day, with nothing to concentrate on except her pain. Carrie re-mortgaged her house and Jen sold the flat in Clapham that her father had bought her all those years ago and which was now worth a lot of money, despite the long line of students that had rented and trashed the place. She was between jobs and dumped boyfriends and had been spending so much time with Carrie anyway that the move into her brother's vacant house was the obvious thing to do.

It took them only two weeks to find and secure the little shop. The rent on the place was headache inducing, but they knew that with a bit of luck and a lot of graft, they could make it work. For a town the size of Cambridge, there weren't very many shops in which people could find things they hadn't seen elsewhere. In its previous life, the shop had been an opticians and had been painted a depressing shade of grey as if the owner had made the decision that vibrant colour would have been wasted on the visually challenged. They gutted the place, clearing out the shelves and mirrored glass and replacing them with pale wallpaper decorated with lavender-coloured birds perched on branches. They found a huge old mirror in a charity shop and painted the battered frame silver and a glass-topped counter that used to live in an underwear shop came from the same source. They discovered sturdy wooden floorboards under the carpet and painted them white.

On the day
Trove
opened Carrie received her divorce papers and a card from Damian wishing her luck with the new shop. ‘It will be a new beginning for you,' he had written. ‘A chance to move forward. I wish you happiness and no more pain.'

Carrie wished it was as easy as he made it sound to begin again. Beginning again implied there had been an ending – but for Carrie there would never be an ending until she knew for certain what had happened to her child.

At lunchtime, Molly got a message from the school secretary that the head teacher from Max's school had rung up requesting to speak to her.

‘It's not an emergency,' the secretary told Molly, ‘but she says could you try and phone her back before the end of the day if you get the chance.'

Molly hastily laid out the tables for the afternoon art session with pots of paint and glitter. She remembered the year before and the scramble to help decorate thirty cardboard picture frames with silver-painted pasta in the half an hour before term ended, and vowed that this time she would have the going-home presents ready well in advance. She stood outside the staff room and phoned Max's school on her mobile. She was put through to Mrs Plumstead, a woman who believed in getting straight to the point and who probably had never left anything to the last minute in her entire career. Max called her the Dalek because of the way she talked in little bursts of instruction. ‘Wash your hands,' he would say in a Dalek voice. ‘Get your lunch. Stop running. Stand behind your desk. Sing louder. Talk more quietly. We wiiiiill exterminate! Exterminate!'

‘I'm rather worried about Max,' Mrs Plumstead said now. ‘I am afraid he had another little episode this morning.' Molly's heart sank. She knew the use of ‘episode' meant that Max had wet himself again.

‘It's just that it's happening more and more frequently. I really think perhaps he should see a doctor. He seems a little stressed. I'm also rather concerned about his inability to write anything that bears the remotest resemblance to his real life. I've had to talk to him a couple of times about telling lies. We encourage imaginative writing, but in their day books the children are supposed to write about what they have done. It's like a diary.

‘Sometimes it is just plain outlandish stuff,' she said, ‘other times he writes things that seem quite credible, but I know they can't be true. Yesterday for instance, he wrote that his father was back in the country. I understood his father has been abroad for an extended period of time …'

‘Yes, he's been in America for the last six months,' said Molly. ‘I'll talk to Max. Maybe his father not being … with us is upsetting him more than I thought. I don't know.' Molly trailed off. The head teacher's silence felt damning. She clearly thought that here was yet another case of adults screwing up their children's behaviour by putting themselves and their own dreary affairs ahead of those of their offspring. After some more talk about the advisability of despatching Max to school with a change of clothes, Mrs Plumstead rang off, and Molly had to put her anxieties to one side for the next hour and focus on ensuring that most of the glitter ended up glued to paper rather than to the children's hair.

When she went to pick Max up he had already made his way out of the after school club and was waiting for her at the gate. He was standing apart from the others, wearing trousers from the school lost property box that were a little too short for him. He got into the front seat of the car, clutching a plastic bag that Molly knew contained the evidence of his humiliation.