Someone to Watch Over Me (5 page)

‘How you doing?' she asked, shutting the door after them and linking her arm through Carrie's arm.

‘I'm fine,' said Carrie. ‘Really. I always look for his face when I see a group of children. I probably always will. It's a kind of reflex now. I look at children two or three years older than he was when he went and it gives me an idea of how he might look now, how tall and stuff.'

‘It's hard to imagine someone getting older when you can't see them. Those age progression images that you see on the TV news always look really strange,' said Jen.

‘I imagine the parents looking at the picture a computer has generated of their child, and thinking, “I would never have done her hair like that” or, “I wouldn't have put her in that blouse”. It must be terrible to see an approximate child and know that's all you are ever going to see,' said Carrie, and Jen saw her clench herself against the words. The pain was always there, waiting to launch itself at her.

‘Anyway, it makes me happier, not sadder to see children having fun and doing all the things they should be doing,' Carrie said, moving around the shop, straightening the clothes on the rails and re-stacking items that had fallen out of place.

At six they shut up shop and Jen went home to ‘soak my feet and have a bloody big glass of red wine'. Carrie placed more orders, looked through some catalogues she had been sent and totted up the day's impressive takings. It was eight before she finally left the shop. When she unlocked her bike, she discovered that the back wheel had developed a puncture. Cursing the rip-off merchant who had had the audacity to sell her a bike with such worn rubber tyres, she started to push it home along the narrow streets. The air smelt of coal fires, once the fuel of the railway workers who used to live in these small terraces. Now of course, most of the houses had underfloor heating and shiny, wall-mounted radiators – real coal fires were simply a fashionable accessory, not a method for keeping warm. A couple walked past, sharing a bag of chips with two wooden forks. They looked so happy, so carefree in their matching hats, like another species thought Carrie bitterly, and the chain fell off her bike.

‘Fucking. Fucking. Hell,' she said and gave it a good kick.

‘What's that bike ever done to you?' asked an amused voice behind her and Carrie turned round to see the man from across the road walking towards her. She made the kind of small coughing noise that was shorthand for, ‘Yes, ha, ha, very funny, now leave me alone,' but he stopped and surveyed the offending machine.

‘Ah, the chain's off,' he announced. She bit back her impulse to congratulate him on his keen powers of observation and started wheeling her bike along the pavement. He fell into step beside her.

‘I don't think I have ever properly introduced myself,' he said. ‘I'm Oliver Gladhill. Carrie, isn't it? Mrs Evans at number eight told me your name. I was going to come round, so I'm glad I've bumped into you now. I'm having a party for Christmas. I've been in the house for almost a year, and I still don't know most of my neighbours.'

‘What a lovely idea,' said Carrie. If he thought that getting the Roses and the Foxtons in the same room was a good way to spread festive spirit she didn't want to be the one to burst his bubble. Let him find out for himself that the two families were fighting a bitter, bloody battle that went back so long that nobody, least of all the participants, knew what had provoked it. If you asked Greta Rose, with her pinched mouth and singular lack of bloom, she would say that the fault lay with the Foxtons and a garden wall that had moved five inches to the right in the middle of the night. Ask Lydia Foxton – who had a competitive streak that made Paula Radcliffe look easy going – about the origins of the enmity and she would claim that the Roses deliberately blocked up their drain with balls of kitchen foil. Last year matters had reached a peak because it was discovered that Ben Rose who at fifteen was the eldest child of the family, had been shagging sixteen-year-old Emily Foxton, with much enthusiasm in the Roses' granny annexe, built to accommodate the worst Rose of all who had fallen down dead the year before whilst surveying the Foxton abode through a powerful telescope. Lydia said that Ben had seduced her innocent daughter and Greta replied that anyone in their right mind could see that Emily in her crotch grazing skirts and tendency to hang around outside the Guildhall was a complete slapper.

‘Next Friday night? Eightish?' said Oliver.

‘Thanks. I'll be there,' said Carrie, irritated by his confidence and the way he seemed to take up so much of the pavement. She resolved to develop an acute headache on Friday afternoon.

They parted company outside her house and Carrie made her way down the dark side alleyway that led into her small garden.

That night she dreamt about Charlie again. This time he was sitting at the end of her bed, his shoulders rounded in his pale blue striped pyjamas worn soft by countless washings. He was reading her a favourite book, about a dog called Crispian who invited a boy to come and live with him in his very tidy two-storey doghouse where everything had its own place. Charlie couldn't read very well yet, but he knew this story by heart. Carrie sat up in bed but she couldn't see his face in the dim light of her bedroom. For a moment she was overcome by a paralysing fear that she wouldn't be able to recognise him. She called out his name in panic and he turned towards her and smiled and she was comforted by the clarity of her memory. Of course she would never forget even the smallest detail of his face. It was engraved on her heart. She woke and lay flat on her back looking up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks from one end of the room to the other. Her face was tight with tears, the pillow wet under her head. It was at these quietest moments that she felt the most pain. It came in slyly with the thin grey light of morning and curled itself around her. It forced her to remember the way his hands held a spoon, his lurching run, the way he tilted his head and looked at her with such immaculate joy.

Damian and Carrie had not made it through. Loss has a way of multiplying like mould spores up a wall, and neither of them had found a way to stop the rot. In the first days and weeks after it had happened, she had clung to him, feeling as if letting go would cast her adrift, but in the end it was he who let go of her.

They had stayed on the beach until the early hours of the morning, despite everyone's efforts to get her to go home. She had watched the sun come up, hoping that its warming rays would touch the beach and restore her child. She thought that he would be there, waiting for her in the curve of a dune, his hair the same colour as the grass, his face alight.

‘I want to stay,' she had said to the policewoman who had held her hand and rubbed her fingers as if against frostbite.

‘There's no point. Come on home now. Come on,' said Damian, his face grey in the thin light.

‘But how?
How
?' she said and she had fallen down then, her body feeling weak and boneless. Someone lifted her up, even dusted the sand from her coat and in the end she let herself be led away, back to their car which was littered with empty packets of stickers and smelt of the banana skin he had left on the back seat. Afterwards, she couldn't believe she had been persuaded to abandon him. She thought with incredulity of her feet walking across the beach away from him. How had she done that? Why had she not just lain down and waited for the wind to cover her with sand? Why did she not run into the sea and let the waves take her? They had left him behind and driven back down the same roads that they had travelled earlier, in another lifetime. It seemed preposterous, obscene, that all was as before. As smooth as water that has closed up after a thrown stone.

Back at the house, Carrie lay on her bed thinking of him alone and cold somewhere, wondering where she was, unable to find her. Perhaps he would be calling for her and feeling puzzled by the fact she didn't come. The pain of it made her twist and bend, as if she was being consumed by fire. She writhed on the bed wrapping the sheets around her hands and arms, unable to stop pulling against them. She didn't sleep or eat for three days and nights. Instead she sat by the phone, willing it to ring, and then trembling in dread when it did. On the fourth day, she drove back to the beach and sat, fully dressed, in the sea. Damian, who had been at the police station, returned to find her gone and drove to the spot he knew he would surely find her. When he approached her she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. He led her past families eating their lunch unheedingly through another perfect summer's day.

At night she sat in Charlie's room holding on to his pillow and the smell of him. Every day a policeman trained to keep his voice solicitous found new ways of telling them there was nothing to tell. Two weeks after Charlie disappeared, some yellow shorts were found on a beach further round the coast. The careful policeman brought them round in a plastic bag and placed them on the edge of the kitchen table. Carrie saw her own stitching in the waistband. She felt as if she was looking at something from another age. A kind of relic.

Then there was nothing else. He didn't turn up buried in the dunes or washed up on the shore. He had vanished. A woman rang the police and claimed she had seen a boy that looked like Charlie with a man on a bus, but it turned out that that she was well known for seeing the missing and murdered. She had once claimed to have seen a whole family on a fairground carousel, eating ice cream. It transpired that their father had killed them all the week before.

At first Carrie didn't want any news. No news meant that he might still be somewhere. Her mind threw up the pictures that had been imprinted from television footage and the retrospective chill of CCTV. She thought with horror of flickering computer screens and men with a taste for the pale, thin bodies of children. She imagined her boy in the back of a lorry on a mattress, perhaps with other children, being taken a long way away where he would never be found. She could see him dressed in unfamiliar clothes, sitting on the edge of beds in strange rooms. Sometimes she saw him in the clearings of woods, in shallow graves with soil only just covering his pale, purplish eyelids. As the days passed into weeks, not knowing where he was began to be the chief source of her pain. And all the time what wore away at her was the knowledge that his going had been her fault. She had fallen asleep on her watch and he had suffered for her negligence. She had not done her job and this was her terrible, cruel punishment. When she finally slept she dreamt of him, arms stretched out, floating on the crest of waves.

Putting her head to one side as if she had a crick in her neck, their counsellor stressed the importance of talking to each other about their feelings. ‘Grieve together,' she told them in the tone of someone recommending a course of healthy exercise. The trouble was that Carrie's way of grieving was nothing like Damian's. Whereas she wanted to go over what had happened again and again, as if by repetition some sense would be made of the completely incomprehensible, he preferred to keep moving. He fixed the loose fence. He emptied out the shed. He sorted his CDs into alphabetical order. Then he decided he should go back to work.

‘It's not doing either of us any good, sitting in the house,' Damian said, as she lay watching him getting dressed. He paused over his selection of ties, choosing one with a thin navy stripe. It was this slight hesitation while his hand hovered over the tie rack that so astonished Carrie and made her realise how alone they both were. On the days she had bothered to get dressed at all, Carrie had simply pulled on the same black sweater, the same jeans. Part of her knew that he selected one tie over another not because he cared about which tie he wore but simply because this little morning ritual was comfortingly familiar to him – but at the same time she felt excluded by his apparent control which seemed to her so much like coldness.

Damian took to saying that he had stayed on at the office to finish work, but when he came home his clothes were impregnated with the metallic smell of the city at night, a taint that you seemed to absorb when you walked for any length of time by the edges of roads. He avoided coming to bed at the same time as her, choosing instead to sit watching TV late into the night, while she lay silently in Charlie's bunk bed. When she was brought home from a store in town, because she had been found in the children's department, her arms full of small shorts and gaily coloured T-shirts, crying square-mouthed at the enormity of her loss, he was impatient with her.

‘You have to move on,' he said but she didn't know where there was to go.

‘Talk to me,' she begged. ‘Tell me how he was. Tell me some of the things he did.'

‘I can't,' he replied, but she couldn't stop herself.

‘Do you remember how when he was a baby his whole naked body used to shake when we trailed a muslin over his stomach?' she said. ‘Do you remember the way he would hook raisins out of those tiny boxes with a bent finger and make a strange growling noise as he did it?'

Even worse than the way she wanted to talk about Charlie all the time, was the way Carrie picked away at the sequence of events that led to their son's disappearance. She reminded him of a bear he had seen years ago in a Spanish zoo walking forwards and backwards endlessly in its concrete canyon. She couldn't let it rest, but carried on down the same groove that gave them both nothing but pain.

‘I slept. Damian. I slept. How could I sleep? Everyone knows that when you are looking after children on a beach, you can't take your eyes off them, even for a minute. Tell me, how could I sleep?' Each time she asked him she would look at him with the same wide-eyed incredulity. At first he felt pity for her and felt his own astonishment mirrored in her face, but when she asked him again and again he was maddened by her and no longer had the strength to spare her. It seemed that there was no way for them to help each other. It seemed that in suffering so differently they made each other's pain worse.