Читать книгу Someone to Watch Over Me: A gripping psychological thriller - Madeleine Reiss - Страница 14

When she woke up on the morning of Oliver’s party, Carrie was sure she wasn’t going to go. There was something about her neighbour that irritated her. He seemed far too sure of himself and she didn’t want to give him the impression that she was in the least bit interested in his well-used charms.

It was raining on her way to work and her bike went through the puddles that had gathered in the uneven surface of the road, splashing her legs and sending muddy sprays up the back of her camel coat. Even quite light showers of rain seemed to saturate Cambridge quickly, streaking the fronts of buildings with ugly damp marks and causing the ancient, inefficient drains to overflow along the sides of the roads. On days like this and in this part of town it seemed like the sweet stretches of green that edged the parchment-coloured colleges were a long way away.

By the time she arrived at Trove, both her coat and the shirt underneath were soaked through. In the little toilet off the kitchen she tried to dry her hair with a hand towel and surveyed the wreck of her make-up in the mottled mirror. She rubbed at her face with some cucumber and lemon cleansing cream, which was from a range she stocked in the shop. Made from natural ingredients, the moisturiser, cleanser and body lotion in their beautiful green glass bottles were produced on a farm in Yorkshire.

Carrie wriggled out of her wet shirt and dried herself as best she could with the minuscule towel. She found a powder blue cardigan with mother of pearl buttons at the back of a rack of clothes and put it on, grateful for the warmth of the soft cashmere. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, but she would wear it and then wash it and sell it. There had to be some perks to having her own shop. Her jeans would just have to drip dry as the day went on. She clipped on some earrings the same colour as her sweater, shook her still-damp hair around her face and felt that she was at last ready for the day. She had a lot of work to do to make the most of the last couple of shopping days before Christmas, and she had to do it alone because Jen had taken the day off to do her own shopping.

She had just taken delivery of a batch of felt brooches, which were ideal as last-minute Christmas gifts. In beautiful dark reds and greens they were shaped like cherries and apples and embroidered round the edges in gold blanket stitch. She decided to use them as the inspiration for a whole display based on food and after putting on a CD of carols she set about covering the table in the centre of the shop with some red gingham material she had bought at an end of line sale. She was so absorbed in her task and so caught up in the purity of the singing, she didn’t hear the doorbell go and jumped when Oliver Gladhill materialised in front of her.

‘Morning!’ he said cheerily, eyeing her still-wet jeans. ‘I see you got caught in the rain.’

Carrie was conscious that her jeans were clinging rather closer to her curves than she liked.

‘Party. Tonight. I need napkins and thought you might do me a discount?’ said Oliver. He had no need of napkins, and in fact, they were something of an alien concept to Oliver, but he had spotted his neighbour’s well-clad bottom through the shop window when he was passing and thought he would use this excuse to check that she was coming to his party. Although clearly grumpy, the woman had something about her, mainly legs that went on forever. Carrie showed him the paper napkins, thinking that perhaps lilac pansies wouldn’t really be his thing, but he took two packets and placed them on the counter.

‘Are you still coming tonight?’

Carrie, who was never good at lying, thought that developing a sudden migraine was unlikely to be convincing. Tempted though she was to say that watching ancient episodes of A Place in the Sun and eating piles of sardines on toast felt like a whole lot more fun, decorum took over.

‘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.