‘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.
Chapter Ten
At lunchtime, Molly got a message from the school secretary that the head teacher from Max’s school had rung up requesting to speak to her.
‘It’s not an emergency,’ the secretary told Molly, ‘but she says could you try and phone her back before the end of the day if you get the chance.’
Molly hastily laid out the tables for the afternoon art session with pots of paint and glitter. She remembered the year before and the scramble to help decorate thirty cardboard picture frames with silver-painted pasta in the half an hour before term ended, and vowed that this time she would have the going-home presents ready well in advance. She stood outside the staff room and phoned Max’s school on her mobile. She was put through to Mrs Plumstead, a woman who believed in getting straight to the point and who probably had never left anything to the last minute in her entire career. Max called her the Dalek because of the way she talked in little bursts of instruction. ‘Wash your hands,’ he would say in a Dalek voice. ‘Get your lunch. Stop running. Stand behind your desk. Sing louder. Talk more quietly. We wiiiiill exterminate! Exterminate!’
‘I’m rather worried about Max,’ Mrs Plumstead said now. ‘I am afraid he had another little episode this morning.’ Molly’s heart sank. She knew the use of ‘episode’ meant that Max had wet himself again.
‘It’s just that it’s happening more and more frequently. I really think perhaps he should see a doctor. He seems a little stressed. I’m also rather concerned about his inability to write anything that bears the remotest resemblance to his real life. I’ve had to talk to him a couple of times about telling lies. We encourage imaginative writing, but in their day books the children are supposed to write about what they have done. It’s like a diary.
‘Sometimes it is just plain outlandish stuff,’ she said, ‘other times he writes things that seem quite credible, but I know they can’t be true. Yesterday for instance, he wrote that his father was back in the country. I understood his father has been abroad for an extended period of time …’
‘Yes, he’s been in America for the last six months,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll talk to Max. Maybe his father not being … with us is upsetting him more than I thought. I don’t know.’ Molly trailed off. The head teacher’s silence felt damning. She clearly thought that here was yet another case of adults screwing up their children’s behaviour by putting themselves and their own dreary affairs ahead of those of their offspring. After some more talk about the advisability of despatching Max to school with a change of clothes, Mrs Plumstead rang off, and Molly had to put her anxieties to one side for the next hour and focus on ensuring that most of the glitter ended up glued to paper rather than to the children’s hair.
When she went to pick Max up he had already made his way out of the after school club and was waiting for her at the gate. He was standing apart from the others, wearing trousers from the school lost property box that were a little too short for him. He got into the front seat of the car, clutching a plastic bag that Molly knew contained the evidence of his humiliation.
‘I’m