‘How you doing?’ she asked, shutting the door after them and linking her arm through Carrie’s arm.
‘I’m fine,’ said Carrie. ‘Really. I always look for his face when I see a group of children. I probably always will. It’s a kind of reflex now. I look at children two or three years older than he was when he went and it gives me an idea of how he might look now, how tall and stuff.’
‘It’s hard to imagine someone getting older when you can’t see them. Those age progression images that you see on the TV news always look really strange,’ said Jen.
‘I imagine the parents looking at the picture a computer has generated of their child, and thinking, “I would never have done her hair like that” or, “I wouldn’t have put her in that blouse”. It must be terrible to see an approximate child and know that’s all you are ever going to see,’ said Carrie, and Jen saw her clench herself against the words. The pain was always there, waiting to launch itself at her.
‘Anyway, it makes me happier, not sadder to see children having fun and doing all the things they should be doing,’ Carrie said, moving around the shop, straightening the clothes on the rails and re-stacking items that had fallen out of place.
At six they shut up shop and Jen went home to ‘soak my feet and have a bloody big glass of red wine’. Carrie placed more orders, looked through some catalogues she had been sent and totted up the day’s impressive takings. It was eight before she finally left the shop. When she unlocked her bike, she discovered that the back wheel had developed a puncture. Cursing the rip-off merchant who had had the audacity to sell her a bike with such worn rubber tyres, she started to push it home along the narrow streets. The air smelt of coal fires, once the fuel of the railway workers who used to live in these small terraces. Now of course, most of the houses had underfloor heating and shiny, wall-mounted radiators – real coal fires were simply a fashionable accessory, not a method for keeping warm. A couple walked past, sharing a bag of chips with two wooden forks. They looked so happy, so carefree in their matching hats, like another species thought Carrie bitterly, and the chain fell off her bike.
‘Fucking. Fucking. Hell,’ she said and gave it a good kick.
‘What’s that bike ever done to you?’ asked an amused voice behind her and Carrie turned round to see the man from across the road walking towards her. She made the kind of small coughing noise that was shorthand for, ‘Yes, ha, ha, very funny, now leave me alone,’ but he stopped and surveyed the offending machine.
‘Ah, the chain’s off,’ he announced. She bit back her impulse to congratulate him on his keen powers of observation and started wheeling her bike along the pavement. He fell into step beside her.
‘I don’t think I have ever properly introduced myself,’ he said. ‘I’m Oliver Gladhill. Carrie, isn’t it? Mrs Evans at number eight told me your name. I was going to come round, so I’m glad I’ve bumped into you now. I’m having a party for Christmas. I’ve been in the house for almost a year, and I still don’t know most of my neighbours.’
‘What a lovely idea,’ said Carrie. If he thought that getting the Roses and the Foxtons in the same room was a good way to spread festive spirit she didn’t want to be the one to burst his bubble. Let him find out for himself that the two families were fighting a bitter, bloody battle that went back so long that nobody, least of all the participants, knew what had provoked it. If you asked Greta Rose, with her pinched mouth and singular lack of bloom, she would say that the fault lay with the Foxtons and a garden wall that had moved five inches to the right in the middle of the night. Ask Lydia Foxton – who had a competitive streak that made Paula Radcliffe look easy going – about the origins of the enmity and she would claim that the Roses deliberately blocked up their drain with balls of kitchen foil. Last year matters had reached a peak because it was discovered that Ben Rose who at fifteen was the eldest child of the family, had been shagging sixteen-year-old Emily Foxton, with much enthusiasm in the Roses’ granny annexe, built to accommodate the worst Rose of all who had fallen down dead the year before whilst surveying the Foxton abode through a powerful telescope. Lydia said that Ben had seduced her innocent daughter and Greta replied that anyone in their right mind could see that Emily in her crotch grazing skirts and tendency to hang around outside the Guildhall was a complete slapper.
‘Next Friday night? Eightish?’ said Oliver.
‘Thanks. I’ll be there,’ said Carrie, irritated by his confidence and the way he seemed to take up so much of the pavement. She resolved to develop an acute headache on Friday afternoon.
They parted company outside her house and Carrie made her way down the dark side alleyway that led into her small garden.
That night she dreamt about Charlie again. This time he was sitting at the end of her bed, his shoulders rounded in his pale blue striped pyjamas worn soft by countless washings. He was reading her a favourite book, about a dog called Crispian who invited a boy to come and live with him in his very tidy two-storey doghouse where everything had its own place. Charlie couldn’t read very well yet, but he knew this story by heart. Carrie sat up in bed but she couldn’t see his face in the dim light of her bedroom. For a moment she was overcome by a paralysing fear that she wouldn’t be able to recognise him. She called out his name in panic and he turned towards her and smiled and she was comforted by the clarity of her memory. Of course she would never forget even the smallest detail of his face. It was engraved on her heart. She woke and lay flat on her back looking up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks from one end of the room to the other. Her face was tight with tears, the pillow wet under her head. It was at these quietest moments that she felt the most pain. It came in slyly with the thin grey light of morning and curled itself around her. It forced her to remember the way his hands held a spoon, his lurching run, the way he tilted his head and looked at her with such immaculate joy.
Chapter Seven
Damian and Carrie had not made it through. Loss has a way of multiplying like mould spores up a wall, and neither of them had found a way to stop the rot. In the first days and weeks after it had happened, she had clung to him, feeling as if letting go would cast her adrift, but in the end it was he who let go of her.
They had stayed on the beach until the early hours of the morning, despite everyone’s efforts to get her to go home. She had watched the sun come up, hoping that its warming rays would touch the beach and restore her child. She thought that he would be there, waiting for her in the curve of a dune, his hair the same colour as the grass, his face alight.
‘I want to stay,’ she had said to the policewoman who had held her hand and rubbed her fingers as if against frostbite.
‘There’s no point. Come on home now. Come on,’ said Damian, his face grey in the thin light.
‘But how? How?’ she said and she had fallen down then, her body feeling weak and boneless. Someone lifted her up, even dusted the sand from her coat and in the end she let herself be led away, back to their car which was littered with empty packets of stickers and smelt of the banana skin he had left on the back seat. Afterwards, she couldn’t believe she had been persuaded to abandon him. She thought with incredulity of her feet walking across the beach away from him. How had she done that? Why had she not just lain down and waited for the wind to cover her with sand? Why did she not run into the sea and let the waves take her? They had left him behind and driven back down the same roads that they had travelled earlier, in another lifetime. It seemed preposterous, obscene, that all was as before. As smooth as water that has closed up after a thrown stone.
Back at the house, Carrie lay on her bed thinking of him alone and cold somewhere, wondering where she was, unable to find her. Perhaps he would be calling for her and feeling puzzled by the fact she didn’t come. The pain of it made her twist and