Someone to Watch Over Me (20 page)

But the only other alternative was too strange and outlandish to contemplate. If she was to allow herself to believe that this man was in communication with her son, this was surely tantamount not only to accepting that Charlie was indeed dead, but that it was possible here in this world to get messages from dead people. She unsuccessfully fought back sudden nausea and had to run quickly to the kitchen sink where she threw up so copiously her throat felt scratched and hot. She tipped half a bottle of bleach round the sink and returned to the table to see that the day was just starting to insinuate itself around the edges of the curtained window. Somehow the brightening light filled her with dread.
He says he went to feed the bird something pink.
And she remembered an uneaten iced cake and saw his small feet digging restlessly through the sand as he looked at the other boy. He took the cake to feed to the flamingo.
That is what happened
, she was suddenly sure. With the certainty came a pain so profound it felt like the end of her.

When morning finally came, Carrie rang the shop and told Jen that she didn't feel well enough to come into work.

‘What are your symptoms?' asked her partner in that officious way she had when it came to medical matters. Jen was suffering under the misapprehension that watching
Holby City
was a good substitute for real medical training. She gave off a knowledgeable air which had fooled more than one person into thinking she knew what she was talking about.

‘Oh, you know, headache, feel tired … probably a bug of some sort,' said Carrie, but Jen, herself a dissembler of the first order, smelled a rat. For a start, she had never known Carrie to take a day off before. A quick phone call to Pam, the world's least discreet person, told her all she needed to know.

‘You take all the time you want,' said Jen, ringing Carrie back ten minutes later. ‘I can manage here and if we get really busy, I know someone who will come in and give me a hand.'

Although exhausted, Carrie had just enough of a spark left in her to remind Jen of what happened when intimacies took place in confined spaces.

‘I sincerely hope that you'll not be availing yourself of the back room and will keep your mind on the job in hand.'

Switching the phone off against her friend's protesting squeals, Carrie forced herself under a shower, feeling the water painfully hot against her skull. She dressed without her usual care, putting on some ancient jeans, a worn grey jumper that had pulled in several places and her wellington boots. She needed to get out somewhere where there was room to breathe and walk and where she could think about what was happening without interruption. The last thing she wanted this morning was her mother's attempts to cheer her up; Pam was at her very worst when trying to be maternal. Carrie much preferred her when she was being her unselfconsciously selfish self.

As she dried her hair she noticed that it was slightly static against the brush, a symptom that she had always associated with the coming of snow. A quick glance out of the window showed that the sky had that sulphurous, almost sepia-hued look that suggested that bad weather was on its way. She left a scribbled note on the kitchen table, saying where she was going and how long she was likely to be. She might be the centre of her own universe but Carrie knew that her mother worried that she wasn't looking after herself well enough, and in a way she was right. Since Charlie had gone, Carrie was all too aware of how happiness could be destroyed in a minute; but somehow this experience had made her less fearful and more careless of her own wellbeing. It was to do with feeling the very worst had happened already and that no disaster that followed, no pain, no absence could be as great.

She drove the five or so miles to Anglesey Abbey and parked in an almost empty car park. The garden wasn't exactly a visitor magnet at this deepest part of winter, when the orchids in the wildflower meadow were lying deep underground, the dahlias had been cut back, their origami blaze nothing but a memory, and the snowdrops had not yet started their pale spread across the earth. But Carrie loved the way the winter laid bare the bones of everything. The shapes of the trees were more distinctive in their structure, easier to compare against each other than they ever were at the height of their beauty. Without the softness of leaf or bud, the dark hedges stood out in sharp relief, making hard, clean lines against the sky. She walked across Temple Lawn to the stone lions set at the entrance of a hedged enclosure of classical statuary and frozen flowerbeds, and sat on one of the benches. She remembered a game that she, Damian and Charlie had played together here. Each of them took turns to guard the male lion and count to thirty whilst the other two hid until they found an opportunity, when the guard had his back turned, of running to the statue and laying claim to it. Charlie was predictably hopeless at the game; never learning from experience, he would again and again crouch down behind the lion, imagining that he was perfectly placed to rise up triumphantly the minute the countdown was completed. They gave up trying to get him to go further afield and would play along, looking around them in counterfeit bewilderment, saying to each other ‘Have you seen Charlie?' ‘Did
you
see which direction he went in?' then wandering just far enough away from him to give him the time to come gleefully up and throw himself onto the back of the lion, clutching the cool flanks between his legs. She could see him there now, arms round the neck of the beast, talking nonsense into its ear, but when she turned away and then looked back, he had gone.

She thought again of what the medium had said. If Charlie had taken the cake to feed the flamingo he would have taken it down to where they had seen the bird in the shallows. Perhaps by then the tide had turned, she couldn't remember, only that the whole world stretched out that day and took on a new shape and her son had got lost somewhere between the sky and the sea. Suddenly Damian appeared in front of her. Because she had been so deep in thought, it took her a couple of minutes to recognise him. His face swam in front of hers, coming only slowly into focus. She noticed he was wearing the kind of hat that she disliked on men, the sort with earflaps best left to the under-fives. He sat down on the bench next to her and put a gloved hand on her knee.

‘When your mum said you had come here, I knew exactly where I would find you,' he said, putting his arm around her and drawing her close.

‘You're frozen!' he said and she tried not to feel the little jolt of irritation she always experienced when she was touched before she wanted to be. Then the feeling went and she found she was glad that he had come. She didn't want to think about all of this on her own any more. She slowly told him what had happened the evening before. Indulgent and a little restless at first, Damian listened with increasing attention. Sometime during Carrie's explanation it started to snow, but both of them were oblivious to the slow drift and settle of the flakes.

‘What do you think it means?' she asked him. ‘I think he must be a fake, but how come he knew about that day?'

‘There is only one way he could have known. Someone told him,' said Damian. His voice was so sure that she instantly believed him. Of course, that must have been what happened. How had she allowed herself to imagine anything different? But then, almost immediately, the doubts rose up in her again.

‘But no one knew but me. Do you even remember what was in that picnic bag all that time ago?'

‘I remember the flamingo,' Damian said, ‘and I remember Charlie asking about how its feathers stayed that colour.'

‘Yes, but have you ever mentioned that fact to anyone else?'

Damian shook his head and then both of them noticed at the same time the way the landscape had changed in front of their very eyes. They saw that snow had made ghosts of everything, giving the benches and the trees and the statues new shapes, making a continuum between things that had been separate before. They walked back to the car park arm in arm, the snow muffling sound and breath and conversation. Deciding to abandon her car until she could come back and get it once the snow was gone, Damian saw her gently to the front seat as if she was an invalid. As he pulled out of the car park he looked at Carrie and spoke as softly as he was able.

‘If
I
didn't tell your medium and
you
didn't tell your medium, then the only other person who knew about that day was Charlie himself.' He paused. ‘I think we need to tell the police about Simon Foster.'

The next morning, the view out of the window sent Max into paroxysms of delight.

‘Let's go tobogganing! Let's build a snowman!' he said, sitting on the bottom step, busily putting his wellingtons on the wrong feet. Molly was only too glad to escape the tension of being in the house. She had rung the police that morning and they still hadn't found Rupert. It was as if he had disappeared off the face of the earth. Perhaps this time he really had gone for good. They drove to the Gog Magog Hills, just beyond Cambridge, the site where the giant Gog and his cohort Magog are said to have indulged in some monstrous cavorting involving ripping up oak trees by their roots and brandishing them at unsuspecting travellers. The legendary giants must have done a good job of stamping all over the terrain since the place now offered the tamest of landscapes with the most modest of hills and a sprinkling of trees. The place was already swarming with people, anxious to make the most of the snow. The small slope down which children were slithering on red and blue plastic sledges was already streaked with mud. As Molly loaded Max onto his sledge she could feel his whole body quivering in the way it did when he was particularly excited. It wasn't a shiver of excitement so much as a vibration that passed through him.

‘Keep your legs tucked in,' she said, ‘and hold on to the rope so you can steer.' Then she gave him a little push and with the help of a series of small, convulsive forward movements, Max set off downwards, shouting with delight. She watched him go all the way to the bottom, narrowly missing a man who was standing with his back to the action and ending up sprawled in the snow, the sledge on top of him. Even above the general noise she could hear him, ‘It's brilliant, Mum! It's the BEST feeling.'

Molly managed to finally persuade Max back into the car, only when the very last of the snow had been smeared into oblivion. Only the most dedicated of the sliders were still doggedly descending and ascending as if fatally addicted to the process. Looking at her son in the mirror, she could see that he would sleep well that night. He already had that half-transfixed look that indicated extreme tiredness. He rubbed his gloved hands across his eyes and then sat looking forward, eyelids heavy, his breathing slow, his face rosy with snow and exertion.

‘Mum,' he said, his voice soft and sleepy, ‘I had the greatest time.'

‘I'm so glad, my love,' replied Molly.

‘I saw Charlie there,' said Max.

‘Did you, darling? asked Molly.

‘He was there and he had a red sledge. I saw him.'

‘You know Charlie wasn't
actually
there. Don't you, Maxy?' said Molly, looking at her son in the driver's mirror. His mouth was set in an uncharacteristically stubborn line.

‘It was definitely him,' said Max. ‘He made tunnels in the snow.'

She pulled up outside the house and drove straight through open the garage door. After collecting coats and boots from the back seat, she ushered Max through the front door. The enormous black cat that had taken to terrorising an already terrified Toffee, streaked brazenly across the hall and hurtled through the cat flap on the kitchen door banging it loudly behind him. Toffee was sitting on top of the bookcase in the hall looking like the victim of a flood, perched as far away as possible from the rising waters.

Molly sent Max upstairs to put the bath on and went into the living room to get the fire going. She sensed he was there before she saw him. It was as if the air in the room had been displaced and had been replaced by some other medium. He was sitting in the chair facing the door. His hands were placed on the armrests, legs were crossed neatly at the ankle. He smiled when she came in and she knew with terrified certainty that she had made a dreadful mistake by choosing to stay at the house.

‘Here you are at last, darling,' Rupert said. ‘I've been waiting for you.'

It was business as usual in Almond Street when Carrie went out on Saturday morning to the shop to get a loaf of bread and a tin of soup. Mrs Evans was standing at the corner, scrutinising the sky as if expecting the imminent arrival of an alien species, Emily Foxton, dressed uncharacteristically modestly in an all-in-one tiger suit, was lurking down the alley by the side of the family home having a sneaky fag and the orchestra at the Musical Prodigy House was in full throttle. Carrie got a glimpse of the pale face of Mr Musical Prodigy almost pressed against one of the bedroom windows. He had no doubt been driven upstairs by the sheer volume of his offspring and their fervent mother. She gave him a little wave and he raised his hand in response as if he was signalling goodbye from on board a boat sailing into a storm.

The police had rung the day before to report back on their interview with Simon Foster who seemed to have had nothing to do with Charlie's disappearance. It turned out that he kept meticulous records for tax purposes and was therefore able to establish beyond a doubt that he had been in Edinburgh that whole weekend. He had presided over an evening in a large theatre so there would presumably be hundreds of witnesses to the fact should one ever be needed. Although they said they were going to investigate further and check some of the information that had been supplied to them, Damian had got the distinct impression that they were not taking the matter seriously.