‘It must have escaped from a bird sanctuary,’ said Damian.
The bird shook itself, as if, like them, it had expected a warmer ocean, took a clumsy run forward and then lifted off with a curious sideways movement, head and neck stretched out, its legs trailing behind like an afterthought. They watched it fly away until it was just a speck.
‘Will it come back, Mum?’
Charlie asked her the question because he knew the beginning of a story when he saw one, and indeed, Carrie was already thinking about a possible bedtime tale which could feature a confused flamingo called Fabian and perhaps Florette, a lost flamingo wife.
‘Why is it pink?’
Damian knew it was something to do with its diet, but was unable to say what it could find on a Norfolk beach that would be pink enough to maintain its plumage.
‘Will it go grey after a while?’ asked Charlie anxiously.
‘I’m not sure, pal,’ said Damian. ‘Perhaps he will find his way home where his brothers and sisters and a bucket of fresh shrimps will be waiting for him.’
After he had been persuaded into a fleece, they had lunch. Charlie ate his bread and an apple and said he wanted to save his cake for later. He sat for a while, watching the boy whose encampment was nearest theirs. He was squatting on his heels and digging energetically. Carrie could tell that Charlie wanted to play with him by the way that he kept sliding his small feet through the sand.
‘Why don’t you go and make friends?’
‘I think he’s older than me,’ said Charlie. She knew how much he hated to be at a disadvantage.
‘He looks pretty much the same age to me.’
Charlie got to his feet and wandered in a self-consciously casual way over to where the boy was scooping up sand. For a while Charlie pretended to be looking for shells, but then he gave up dissembling and stood over the other boy, watching his endeavours with a critical eye.
After what he clearly considered to be the correct amount of time, Charlie finally spoke.
‘My name’s Charlie. I’m five. How old are you?’
The boy looked up at him and answered. Carrie didn’t catch what he said, but it must have been encouraging because Charlie got down on his hands and knees and started burrowing too. They each began to excavate from a different point and dug along towards each other. Whenever their hands made contact under the cool sand and another tunnel was formed, they exclaimed in surprise. Carrie watched them for a while, but then the effects of lunch and the sun began to catch up with her and she lay back on the picnic rug. She could hear Damian turning the pages of the newspaper, the occasional voice shouting, and once, what sounded like a helicopter, but the sounds were muffled. Black shapes swarmed behind her eyelids and she dozed. She woke when Damian tickled her bare feet.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sleepy head,’ he said, ‘but I need to go to the toilet. I’ll have to go back to the car park.’
Carrie shook herself awake and sat up to look at Charlie, who was still playing with his new friend. She got her magazine out of her bag, rolled over onto her stomach and tried to read but the words swam in front of her eyes and she laid her head down on the paper and slid back into sleep. Charlie’s voice woke her the second time. She rolled over onto her side and squinted up at him, but the sun was too bright to see his face.
‘Can I go down to the sea again?’
‘Only if you go with your father.’
‘Dad’s still not come back.’
‘Well you’ll just have to wait until he does. Where’s that other little boy gone?’
‘He had to go for a walk with his mum.’
‘Is he nice?’
‘Yes.’ Charlie made his case by ticking off his new friend’s attributes on his fingers.
‘One, he is five. Two, he has yellow hair. Three, he isn’t mad on bats. Four, he likes Scooby Doo. Please can I go down to the sea?’
‘Just wait a bit, I can’t leave the bags. Wait till Dad gets back.’
Carrie sat up, and Charlie sat down next to her, looking up every now and again to see if Damian was coming. Finally he spotted him in the distance making his way back down the beach.
‘Can I go and meet him … please … and then we can swim …?’
‘Only if you give me a kiss first,’ said Carrie, lying back down. He knelt next to her and planted his lips on her cheek, stroked one sandy hand across her face.
‘I love you every single day,’ said Charlie.
‘And I love you every single day too,’ said Carrie, and shut her eyes.
Afterwards, she wasn’t able to say how long she had been asleep. She thought it could only have been a matter of minutes.
‘Where’s Charlie?’ asked Damian, appearing suddenly above her.
Carrie, like every parent, was always only a moment away from panic. All it took was for her to lose sight of him when he lagged behind in a crowd, or when he was hidden by a slide in a park, and she felt a dip in her stomach. She felt that familiar lurch now.
‘I thought he was with you.’
‘No, I left him here when I went to the toilet. I’ve just been for a run.’
Carrie stood up and scanned the beach. There were a number of figures in the distance that could have been him. It wasn’t easy to see that far away. She couldn’t immediately spot anyone in the distinctive yellow shorts he was wearing.
‘You stay here in case he comes back. I’ll go and look for him.’
Carrie started running towards the sea.
Chapter Two
Molly watched Max as he lay on the floor, lining up his plastic animals in strict formation. He was using the geometric design on the border of the carpet to ensure that all hooves and paws toed the line. The ark stood waiting with its gangplank down and its tiny bearded Noah standing to attention on the deck. Max’s tendency to place things in lines was sometimes disconcerting – miniature soldiers faced certain death as if about to start a race; crayons lay in an orderly rainbow all the way along the hall. Cards trimmed the mantelpiece in royal flushes. He even rearranged the food on his plate in sequence, with the least desirable items bringing up the rear. Since this was a recent habit, Molly wondered if this behaviour was a sign of inward disturbance. Possibly she should be worried by his seemingly compulsive need to order the world. Maybe she was simply reading too much into it and he was disclosing a propensity that had always been there, waiting for the right set of animals or the new box of crayons. He had probably been born with the straight-line gene, and would grow up into an adult who was fond of graphs and trousers ironed sideways and pint glasses placed neatly in the centre of beer mats. She thought that what she was really looking for in his behaviour, were confirmations of her own sadness.
Although the Christmas tree bent slightly to the left, Molly thought it looked pretty, with its multi-coloured lights flicking out some sort of puzzling rhythm. They had gone and got the tree together and brought it back in the car with its tip sticking out through the window. She had resisted the temptation to take charge of its decoration, despite the fact that Max had adorned all the lower branches with the heaviest baubles so that they bent at the ends and almost touched the floor.
She started to put away the canvas she had been working on earlier in the day, a small watercolour of the view out of the window. It was the first