Someone to Watch Over Me (30 page)

‘Hearing that he had drowned tore me up, but there was a part of me that felt something had been released in me, like the cork from a bottle. These later messages are much worse to listen to. I can't bear to think of him suffering.'

‘But he's not suffering now,' said Jen. ‘He can't be. I don't think you should listen to Simon Foster any more.'

‘I can't just leave it though. I can't,' said Carrie. ‘I can't turn my back on him. This is truly the last of him. I feel him slipping away.'

As they went back into the shop, Carrie's phone started ringing. Carrie listened for a minute and then rang off, her face white.

‘What's happened?' asked Jen.

‘Simon wants to see me,' said Carrie. ‘Charlie has been sending some more messages.'

Pam, who had given up stocktaking and was sitting on an unopened box having a cup of tea, insisted that she go with her daughter. The taxi arrived almost immediately and fifteen minutes later, they were standing outside Simon's flat.

‘The windows could do with a clean,' muttered Pam, eyeing them disapprovingly, and Carrie rang on the bell.

Simon opened the door looking as if he hadn't slept for a week. His pale eyes were shot through with veins, his shoulders were stooped, the lines on his face deeper than ever. Carrie noticed with alarm that even his usually immaculate clothes bore signs of neglect. His collar was dirty, his trousers stained. In the living room too there were signs of disturbance. The books had been turned over and there was just the faintest odour of food, some vegetable matter that had been left out too long that was now on the turn.

‘I'm sorry about the mess,' said Simon, pushing some papers off the sofa to make room for them. ‘I haven't been very well.'

‘Are you well enough to see us?' asked Carrie. Something about the slightly-too-careful way that he was moving made Carrie think that he might have been drinking.

‘I needed to see you,' he said. ‘I think he won't ever leave me alone unless I can get you to understand what it is he is saying. The trouble is I don't really understand it myself.'

Simon passed an unsteady hand back and forth across the top of his head as if to comfort himself.

‘His messages have become more and more frantic. He often shouts, and yesterday I actually think I saw him flash across the corner of my vision. It was quick, as if he was trying to jump.'

Carrie felt saliva gather in her mouth as if she might be sick.

‘What is he saying?' asked Pam.

‘He talked about darkness and danger from a man. He started on again about not being able to breathe. A mother being hurt. The smell of water rising. Then he kept repeating
tell her, tell her, tell her she has to save Max.
'

Simon got up, bent over Carrie and touched her on the hand. She could smell alcohol on his breath and she looked up into his washed-out eyes.

‘He told me to tell you he loves you every single day,' said Simon, and Carrie felt her heart contract as if it had been punched.

‘Why is he talking about Max?' asked Carrie.

‘I don't know,' said Simon sitting back down. The reporting of the messages seemed to offer him some relief. He rested his head against the back of his chair and shut his eyes.

‘You look terrible. You need a stiff drink,' Pam said, bossily taking Carrie's arm and almost pushing her through the door of the first pub they came to. They drank several glasses of red wine, and were both quite drunk by the time they resumed their walk home. Pam got the heel of one of her teetering shoes stuck in a drain and broke it.

‘Oh bloody hell,' she said, trying without success to reattach it.

‘Marilyn Monroe did it on purpose,' said Pam as she almost turned her ankle trying to negotiate the edge of the pavement. ‘She chopped a bit off the heel of one of her shoes. It's what gave her that famous sexy wiggle.'

‘Why don't you just pull the other one off and even yourself out?' said Carrie.

‘I'm getting this heel repaired and I'm not paying to have both of them fixed when I only broke one,' said Pam indignantly.

Carrie needed all her concentration to work out where the lampposts were positioned. The message from Charlie had hit her hard. She remembered all too clearly what her last words to her son had been. They were words that they had often said to each other, a kind of incantation to ward off evil. She felt absolutely exhausted, as if she no longer had the strength to feel anything at all. She imagined her body finally giving up under the pressure and crumpling like those pictures of cars that have driven into lorries, when you can't believe anyone has got out alive because there isn't anything recognisable left in the concertinaed metal.

When she got home Pam made her a cup of coffee and Carrie went to the drawer in her room where she had put the last photos of Charlie from her old camera. She lay down on her bed and curled her body around a pillow. She felt she needed to be careful with herself if she was to avoid further harm. The images tore at her all over again. She hated above all the fact that already they had begun to seem out of date. It wouldn't be long before someone would look at Charlie's hair, the style of his shorts, even the quality of the colour in the images and think of them as old, just as she did when she flipped through pictures in antique shops; piers that had long ago melted into the sea, family groups lined up outside shuttered shop frontages, children wearing strange-shaped collars and stilted smiles.

The last photograph in the pack was the one with Max in it. She had a sudden image of running up to him that day in the midst of her terror and asking him if he had seen Charlie. Was there some particular significance in this moment that she had failed to register because she had been in such mortal terror? In the photograph he was sitting on a towel looking straight at the camera with Charlie in the foreground. Because he wasn't at the centre of the picture, his face was a little out of focus, but it was still clear enough. Right at the edge of the photograph was Molly, her hair held back by a scarf tied into a bow, her face in profile. She was opening a picnic basket or a beach bag. Max had very distinctive, almond-shaped eyes and ears that stood enough away from the side of his head for other children to have surely drawn attention to them. Children had an unerring ability to seek out the soft, unprotected spots of others. That was how children survived; their mothers opened up their softest spots and let them settle in there, recklessly heedless of the pain they knew would follow as a result of making themselves so vulnerable. He looked anxious. He certainly didn't have the face of a carefree child. She thought of the way he had stood so still in the shop, allowing her to hold him, as if he knew that it was comforting her. She felt a great, unexpected surge of anger against Charlie. She was shocked by the strength of the feeling that engulfed her. He had broken her heart and devastated her life and now he was tormenting her with messages she didn't understand. The dead were supposed to send messages of comfort to the living weren't they? Not cryptic warnings about children she hardly knew. Her anger gave her some respite from hearing the sound of his voice, and with the photographs still littered around her and with tears drying on her face, Carrie fell asleep. Pam, tiptoeing in a short while later, covered her with the duvet and drew the bedroom curtains.

Carrie dreamed she was back on the beach. She was making the walk out towards the horizon but this time she was alone. Everything else was as it had been. The sun containing within its tentative warmth a warning of incoming clouds, the sand giving slightly as she walked, emptying itself of moisture under the weight so that each footstep left a ghost of itself. When she came to the edge of the sea where the water sucked in and out, she rolled up her trousers and went in. Just ahead of her a child in yellow shorts was floating face down, moving slowly, rocked by the gentle rise and fall of the waves. Carrie ran towards him, but although she was soon up to her waist, she wasn't any closer. He drifted just out of her reach. She could feel the tug of the water, could sense its dangerous lure and she allowed herself to be taken, until she too was as light as flotsam on the waves. She floated out until she reached him and to her immense joy she could feel that he was alive. The pulse was leaping in his narrow neck and when she held him close she could feel his heart pumping. She used all her strength to pull him back to the shore, holding him around his neck and swimming beneath him and eventually arrived, gasping on the sand. When she turned towards him she saw Max lying looking at her.

Carrie woke in the late afternoon with a raging thirst and a throbbing headache. She went downstairs, poured herself a large glass of orange juice and drank it standing up, looking out of the patio doors. She watched a neighbour's cat walk across the lawn and then start to dig with delicate paws in a patch of earth. Carrie knocked half-heartedly on the glass door and the cat gave her a startled yellow-eyed stare and then made off back through the hole in the fence. A bit of cat crap would really make very little difference she reflected, since the garden was such a mess. The work she had done on it only seemed to have made it look worse and there were still plant pots full of rotting geraniums and the matted clumps of dead lobelia that she had yet to tackle. The flowerbeds too were in dire need of clearing and digging over. The whole place had an air of sodden neglect despite the silver light and the delicate strands of pink in the sky. She could see the place by the rhododendron bush where they had all stood one rainy afternoon and had a funeral for Bun the hamster. Charlie had wept great fat tears and wrung his hands while Damian had buried the creature in a rice box, but she had felt a great sense of release. The animal had been nothing but a source of guilt to Carrie. Whilst they sat around reading the papers and eating bacon sandwiches or watching TV, Bun had spent his miserable days and nights going round and round on his wheel, his horrible tiny claws clutching at the plastic.

Carrie felt suddenly lonely, unable to spend even another minute by herself, brooding about dead hamsters and Charlie and the messages. The house seemed to be closing in on her. She went upstairs, changed into clean jeans and a pale blue loose shirt tied around the neck in a big bow and ballet pumps in almost the same colour. She pulled on her coat, grabbed a bottle of wine from the rack in the kitchen and before she could change her mind, crossed over the street to Oliver's house and knocked on the front door. He came to the door barefooted, his shirt untucked.

‘I'm not disturbing you am I?' asked Carrie waving the bottle of wine at him.

‘Not at all, come in. I was just pretending to do some work,' said Oliver, smiling broadly and ushering her into his front room. He closed the laptop on his desk and turned on a lamp on a side table.

‘You were working,' Carrie said. ‘Please tell me if you would rather I came another time.'

‘I'm honestly glad for the distraction,' said Oliver, taking her coat and sitting her down on a comfortable, cushion-littered sofa.

‘I'll just open this and get us some glasses,' said Oliver leaving her to look around the room. Carrie hadn't seen the place in its usual state, only as it had been when cleared for the infamous Christmas party. An event that was still talked about on Almond Street in hushed tones. It seemed that an uneasy rapprochement had occurred between the Roses and the Foxtons. In fact, rumours were rife that there had been a spot of seventies-style wife swapping, but Carrie had trouble imagining any of them having sex at all, least of all putting their differences aside for long enough to muster up the necessary energy. She suspected the rumour had been started by Mrs Evans, who not only liked to indulge in gloomy, end of the world predictions mostly involving natural disasters and mass contagions, but she also had a somewhat prurient mind. Carrie determinedly put all thoughts of her neighbours' sex lives out of her mind and looked around her. The room was surprisingly cosy, with pictures and photographs on all the walls and bright rugs spread out on the wooden floor. There was a group of sculptures of birds on the windowsill, a vase of yellow roses on the coffee table and a great bowl of stones of all shapes and sizes on the desk. She had been expecting the rather more neglected home of the typical single man, with a focus on gadgets and ease of access to the fridge rather than this place, that looked as if a lot of thought had gone into the arrangement of it. Carrie wondered whether the room had been decorated by one of Oliver's ex-girlfriends, although it seemed unlikely that he had allowed one to remain in post long enough for her to pick out the soft furnishings. Oliver came back into the room and handed her a glass of wine.

‘This is a beautiful room,' said Carrie.

‘Thanks,' said Oliver, sitting down next to her on the sofa. ‘It was a bit of a mess when I moved in, but I enjoyed decorating it and making it nice. This is my first proper home and it was great to be able to get all my things out of storage and put them out.'

‘Where were you living before?' asked Carrie.

‘All over the place. I lived in America for quite a long time and then in London and then Italy and Spain. Wherever the work or my whim took me really,' said Oliver. ‘Are you OK, Carrie?' he asked, looking at the bluish shadows under her eyes.

Instead of answering she looked at him and then put her mouth against his. She kissed him hard, opening his lips with her tongue, and then moved her hands under his loosened shirt feeling his smooth chest, his heart beating fast under her hands. She unbuttoned her shirt, pulled her bra aside and put his hand on her breast. He ran his flattened palm against her and she felt the pulse between her legs throb in response. She moved her hands down his thighs and then lower, and felt him straining against the fabric of his trousers. She heard his swift intake of breath when she unzipped his fly and put her hand inside. He ran the tip of his tongue down her neck, lapping gently at the little hollow in her throat. She released him from his trousers and stroked him, feeling him jerk under her hand. She was in a hurry now and pushed him back on the sofa, pulling his trousers down and straddling him. She bent and allowed her mouth to just graze, then lightly lick the end of his penis and she felt his body bucking beneath her as he positioned himself closer to her mouth. She wanted the forgetting that came with pure sensation. She wanted to stop feeling anything other than this obliterating passion. Almost at the point of no return, Oliver took hold of her hands and stilled her.