Someone to Watch Over Me (16 page)

The man with the handkerchief blew his nose loudly and looked up at Simon with tears in his eyes. Carrie surreptitiously looked at her watch. It was all very well, all this talking, but when was he going to get down to business? The sooner he got on with it, the sooner she could get back to a glass of wine and a plate of the chicken casserole that was melting in the slow cooker five streets away.

‘To cut a long story short, I couldn't cope with the pressure. I couldn't tell anyone what was happening to me. Hearing voices is not exactly compatible with an army career and in the end I left. My father was hugely disappointed with me and made his feelings so clear that I didn't feel I could go home. After years of knowing exactly what was expected of me, of having my every action mapped out for me, being in the outside world felt very strange. I didn't know what to do when I wasn't operating to a timetable and nor did I know what else I wanted to do with my life. I started drinking a lot. Friends who had been happy to put me up got fed up with me. I slowly ran out of favours. One night I was out drinking and realised I had nowhere to go, so I slept in a park in London. I stayed in that park and other parks like it for two years. Drinking stopped me facing anything and it also drowned out the voices. It will take me too long to tell you how I eventually got myself out. But I did. Part of what helped me was learning finally to accept that what I have is a gift. An irritating and inconvenient gift, sometimes, but something that I can use to make people feel better.'

Simon began to walk around the outside of the circle of chairs, almost touching people's backs as he passed. He walked slowly, and his voice became quiet, almost dream-like.

‘I want you to know that everything said here is in confidence and I hope that you respect each other and keep to that rule. I don't always hear the people I want to hear. There are times when no one in the room recognises anyone that I am channelling.'

How very convenient, thought Carrie. He has set things up so that he can talk a lot of mumbo jumbo and then if no one can relate to anything he is saying, he has the ultimate get out of jail free card of saying ‘Oops, wrong people, wrong time.' She felt impatient with herself for being even briefly impressed by this man. He had a certain presence, but then he would need to have a bit of charisma to get away with what he was doing.

‘I want you all to be as still and as receptive as you can be. I want you to help me to hear the people who want to be heard here, today,' said Simon. He stopped walking, lifted his head up to the ceiling and what could only be described as a kind of ripple crossed his face; a rearrangement of his features that caused his mouth to slacken and the skin around his chin to soften. Despite herself, Carrie was quite startled by the transformation.

‘There's a number of people with me,' he said. His voice had become more of a monotone, seeming suddenly drained of the personality it had had before. ‘They jostle for me. It's hard at first to pick out the ones that most need to be heard … I've got a woman with me. Big personality. Loud voice … she is saying something about someone in this room who is ill. Is there someone in this room who is worried about her health? She's quite insistent. Is she a mother? Has someone here had a mother who has died?'

‘Pretty safe bet, Simon Foster,' muttered Carrie, earning a reproving look from Pam.

Simon looked around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the buttoned-up lady who had become flushed and who was rubbing her hands together in an agitated fashion.

‘My mum passed over six months ago,' she said.

‘That'll be her,' said Simon. ‘Not a shrinking violet, this lady.'

‘No,' said Ms Button and something that might have been a smile crossed her face. ‘She had forceful opinions, to say the least.'

‘She's saying that she knows you are worried about a health-related issue. Does that ring a bell? She is saying, and I quote: “Tell the fool that she should stop worrying. There's nothing wrong with her that a bottle of tonic and a good night's sleep won't put right. And tell her to take off her coat.”'

Ms Buttoned-up rubbed her eyes with curiously childlike fists.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I know that's her, couldn't be anyone else.'

Simon moved on. There were a couple of voices that meant nothing to anyone in the room, a message that might or might not have come from the brother of the tearful man, but the mood in the room changed over the two-hour session. It was clear that the participants had found varying degrees of comfort. Even those people who hadn't received messages from anyone seemed buoyant. Carrie could see that Simon's influence was a positive one, but she still felt removed from the other people who seemed so ready to believe that their dead relatives and loved ones were hanging around waiting to pass on messages via some nut job ex-soldier. She was relieved when the session came to an end and made for the exit, Pam chattering behind her like someone who had just had gaffer tape pulled from her mouth. Simon was at the door saying goodbye to people as they left and as she approached him his strange pale eyes met hers. He held out his hand to shake and she was surprised by the strength she felt in the pressure of his fingers on hers.

‘You are very resistant,' he said, in his almost prim, clipped voice. ‘The lines are not as clear as you might imagine.'

‘I'm just not a believer,' she said and pulled her hand away, but his unsettling gaze stayed with her for a while afterwards.

Driven into her bedroom by Pam, who not only showed little sign of going home, but had also taken it upon herself to advise in matters of interior design, Carrie decided to have a sorting session. The long indulgence of Christmas had left her feeling that it was time to take stock and streamline both her waist and her cupboards. Besides which, she knew she might well murder her mother if she stayed downstairs to witness the remodelling that was taking place in the living room. Through the floorboards she could hear the sound of wooden legs being dragged across a wooden floor and she gritted her teeth. She wondered, not for the first time, where her mother got her energy. Although the woman regularly became completely supine when it was time to prepare food or to wash up, Pam was a positive whirling dervish when it came to demonstrating her superior taste. The two of them had attempted to get Carrie a black coat in the sales the day before and the experience had left Carrie feeling exactly as she used to do when she was twelve and her pleas for a fashionable school skirt or for shoes without buckles met with scorn. ‘It looks so very cheap, darling,' Pam used to say about her daughter's choice. Her mother never quite grasped that it didn't matter that a skirt was not lined as long as it was the right length and had correctly placed pockets.

At the back of the cupboard, behind such disparate objects as hair curlers, expired diaries and half-completed cross-stitch tapestries (Carrie had a tendency to be seduced by the thought of nimble fingers flashing over bright strands of wool, but almost invariably became disillusioned by the length of time it took to complete even the smallest corner), she found her old camera. She had bought herself a digital one a year ago and hadn't needed this one any more. She picked it up and examined it, wondering if it might be worth keeping or whether she should take it to a charity shop. When she took off the lens cap, some sand fell into her hand and she felt the small sliding away inside her that always came when she thought of Charlie. It amazed her that this shock always felt new, always had the power to unsettle her. This was the camera she had with her on the day he had gone. The police, along with everything else she had abandoned on the beach, had returned it to her and she had put it away and forgotten about it. She saw that the film inside was finished and she opened the back of the camera to retrieve it. She had hundreds of pictures of Charlie; from the very first squashed-faced one taken minutes after his birth, to the pictures of his fifth birthday party where he was captured capering joyfully in a Dennis The Menace outfit. In the early days after his disappearance she had not been able to look at any photographs at all. She had been scared that seeing him would simply scratch at her pain, making it raw all over again. But as the weeks became months she realised, with quite another, much worse sort of fear, that his face had lost its clarity. She found she was struggling to remember exactly how his hair lay across his forehead or the creases in the corners of his mouth, and she had turned to her photograph albums with relief. Indeed, photographs of Charlie became a great comfort to her. She saw that there was no shadow in his face. She was the one who had been left to face the darkness. The years would pass and here he would remain, distinct and loved. Carrie knew that the film must contain pictures of Charlie and she wanted to see them straight away. This was a little bit of him that she hadn't realised she possessed.

A shop assistant delivered the blue packet into her hand and Carrie walked quickly across the road, down past the bus station and part of the way across Christ's Pieces, until she found a bench by an empty flowerbed. The council gardeners had taken out the frost-burnt chrysanthemums in wheelbarrows and turned the earth over. It wasn't the weather for lingering, the cold was making her face and neck sting, but Carrie found she couldn't wait. Her hands were trembling as she unsealed the packet. The first few photographs were of an evening out she had taken with colleagues to a restaurant. She could vaguely recall that it had been a celebratory gathering, but she could no longer remember what was making them all smile. There was a picture of her with the cross-eyed face she often made when someone she didn't know very well pointed a camera at her. She thought she looked dumb, unmarked, like the ‘after' picture in an advertorial for plastic surgery. Except this, of course, was before. Next there was a shot of the beach, with a line drawn across the sky by an absent plane and then … Charlie. Oh Charlie. His head back, his hands outstretched and full of sand. Charlie. Walking along looking downwards. A shot of him making a face with a piece of orange fishing net wrapped around his head. Her heart caught at his huge smile and two missing teeth. She thought of the teeth, which were still tipped with his blood and in a drawstring bag in her jewellery box. Plunder of the tooth fairy and now not the extra of him, just the all. There was a picture of him on his hands and knees, digging a hole in the sand with the boy he had met on the beach with his mother in the background sitting on a towel. One of him showing the camera a strange-shaped stick. And then nothing more.

That evening Carrie phoned Damian to tell him about the pictures, and only hesitated a moment when he asked her if he could come over and see them that evening. She peeled potatoes, seasoned some lamb chops and sliced orange and red peppers ready for roasting. She opened a bottle of red wine and took a glass of it upstairs. She changed into a tunic-length black jumper and a pair of new dark denim jeans and put on a jet and pearl necklace that Damian had bought her years ago during a weekend they had spent together in Whitby. She remembered that it had been foggy and that they had spooked each other in a shrouded Abbey and eaten ice cream drizzled with strawberry vampire blood.

Jen had never been that keen on Damian, although she had attempted to hide her doubts about him, but then she had never been that keen on any of Carrie's boyfriends. Carrie had met Damian when she was twenty-seven, living in London and working as a researcher in the fundraising department of a cancer charity. He was three years older and worked in the communications department. He spent his days trying to persuade indifferent editors that they might like to write something about the importance of respite care for the families of terminally ill people. What reason is there for us to cover this story now? they would ask, eager to get him off the phone. Give us a hook. He had a slight stutter that became more pronounced when he was under stress. Carrie liked the way he ran his hands despairingly through his hair and the fact that he made coffee for the whole office.

They got together after the work Christmas party. A chilly affair in a church hall at which the staff, terrified of being seen to be spending money that could be better spent elsewhere, ate sausage rolls and supped on sweet red wine out of plastic cups. Carrie left early, driven home by hunger and the beginnings of a cheap-wine-induced headache. Damian spotted her leaving and followed her out. They went for a Chinese meal and although Carrie was seduced by the way he looked at her mouth all the time she was talking, they didn't kiss when he dropped her off at the door of her flat. The second date, they sat together in the cinema. She touched his thigh and he traced a line around her ear and down her neck with one finger. They missed the second half of the film to kiss against a wall in the alley alongside the movie house and she was surprised at the bold way he pulled up her skirt and pushed aside her knickers to feel her. The following weekend they stayed in a hotel in Hunstanton and got wet walking from groyne to groyne on a rain-lashed beach. She loved the feel of his stomach still chilled from wet wool and the fact that he didn't stutter when he said her name as he came.

‘When we touched each other it just felt right,' she said the next day over the phone to Jen who was working in Paris at the time and tormenting her journalist boyfriend with her particular brand of indifference.

‘What's he look like?'

‘He's tall, about four inches taller than me. Dark red hair, not carroty like Ron Weasley …'

‘Eyelashes?'

‘Well … they are pale …'

‘Boris Becker,' said Jen with disdain. BB was a loathsome figure in her eyes, not only because he had invisible eyelashes, but because he had been caught having sex in the broom cupboard of a restaurant. For obvious reasons she harboured a hatred towards men who liked to have sex in confined public places.