Someone to Watch Over Me

To my dearest three – David, Felix and Jack
And in love and memory of my father,
Barry Unsworth 1930–2012

Table of Contents

He held her hand tightly. It was dark and it was hard to see the path. She had told him to watch where he put his feet and not to get too near the black channel of water. He knew for a fact there were bad things hidden right down deep at the bottom of it. There were supermarket trolleys and stolen cars and rotting cows, which had toppled out of their fields into the canal and not been able to get out. There were snakes that swam all twisty through the coldness. He thought that there were people in there too. He thought of bodies floating upright, anchored to the slimy bottom by curling fronds of weed. He had once seen an eyeball coming out of a drowned person's head on a TV programme. He had watched through the crack in the door and afterwards he had wished he hadn't. Once you saw things they stayed with you forever. Even though they were walking so fast it made him breathless and even though her nails were digging into his hand, he was glad to get out of the house. He just wished he knew where they were going.

‘Will we be able to stop soon?' he asked.

‘Just a bit further. We can't stop yet.'

Her face gleamed all white and her mouth was stretched out thin. He knew they would never be able to go fast enough or far enough, however hard they tried. He wished they could change themselves into giant birds and fly as far as Africa. Big, yellow birds that could see in the dark and camouflage themselves against the sand in the daytime. In his brain he sang the song that made him feel better and tried with all his might to escape into clear open spaces and a sea without edges.

Carrie stood on the pavement outside the shop. It looked even better than she had imagined it would. The window, trimmed with lace stencils and silver stars, framed a display of what she hoped were the most irresistible Christmas gifts ever. There were creamy cashmere dressing gowns, strings of crystal beads, amber earrings with ancient insects trapped in their glowing depths, vintage cake stands laden with glittering brooches, elegant party shoes with buckles and curved heels, old silk scarves traced with faded Eiffel Towers and caped matadors. Tomorrow,
Trove
would open its doors to the paying public, and all the months of work would have been worthwhile.

Back inside the shop she checked that everything was perfect; the pan of mulled wine was ready to be heated up on the tiny stove in the back room, the cinnamon-scented candles were lined up along the counter alongside the piles of brown bags, each stamped with the name of the shop and fastened with red ribbon. She took one last look round, then set the alarm and clicked off the lights. Her bike was locked up at the back of the shop, the saddle already sheened with frost. Tucking her coat around her legs and sitting gingerly on the hastily wiped seat, she set off down the road hoping that her flickering front light would last until she got home. She had bought the bike from a shop just round the corner from where she lived and she had realised, even as she was buying it, that it wasn't the most practical of purchases. She should have looked more closely at the state of the tyres and at the chain clotted with rust rather than been seduced by its green and silver stripes and large wicker basket laced through with plastic daisies.

As she cycled down the largely empty streets, she looked into windows warmed with lights and decorations and clouded with cooking steam and the moisture from people talking and laughing in small rooms. Carrie felt the familiar sadness settle around her heart. She could distract herself for some of the time, but it always came back to this. This dogged pain that refused to let her go, but carried her mercilessly out to that wide-open sea and sky.

It had been Carrie's decision to go to the coast that day; Damian would have preferred to have stayed at home to read the papers and fix the fence that had blown loose sometime over the winter. She loved expeditions, particularly those that involved chill bags and flasks, and she got up early to fix a feast of cheese and tomato baguettes and crisps and some sinful sundae-type desserts in their own plastic glasses. Charlie, who had just turned five, hadn't yet mastered the sandwich. Cheese was fine, and bread, by itself, was more than acceptable, but put the two elements together and he acted as if she was offering him something impossible to contemplate, a culinary monstrosity that made his small shoulders shudder. For Charlie she packed a hunk of bread, some Babybel cheeses and a cake with pink icing.

It was the sort of summer day that is called perfect because it is so very rare. They rolled down the windows as they drove, and the car seemed to be full of sun and the smell of warm plastic from the water bottles on the back seat. The Norfolk coast was only a couple of hours away from Cambridge, an easy drive on a chilly day, but likely to be slower today with the roads full of people making for the sea. Charlie had developed a taste for Ella Fitzgerald and sang along under his breath to the CD he insisted on having at full volume.

‘“I love to go out fishing, in a river or a creek, but I don't enjoy it half as much as dancing cheek to cheek
…” What's a creek?'

‘A stream, as in, “I'm up shit creek without a paddle”,' said Damian, who was better than Carrie at providing succinct explanations of the meaning of words.

‘Umm … Dad said a rude word!' said Charlie with delight.

Carrie could see her son in the wing mirror. She loved looking at him. At his neat head, his serious dark brown eyes, the way his eyebrows rose and rounded every time he talked. Sometimes she went into his room and watched him sleeping, even climbed the first rung of the ladder of his bunk bed so that she could get close enough to smell that combination of salt and sweetness that was unique to him. She wasn't a particularly patient mother. She wasn't fond of activities involving flour or tubs of poster paint and there were times when his chatter drove her to a kind of bored distraction, but most of the time he dazzled her. Her love felt overwhelming, liquid, like blood through veins or a sea, filled beaker-like to the very brim.

They arrived at the beach at about lunchtime and dragged food and rugs and buckets along the sand until they found a place that was far enough away from other people to satisfy Damian, who had a ‘no radios, no dogs and no other people's children' rule which tended to narrow their options. Since having Charlie, Carrie also had a rule which she kept to herself that involved not setting up camp anywhere near young, firm girls who looked as if they might strip off at any moment and indulge in a vigorous game of volleyball. They settled at last for a hollow in the dunes, some distance away from a woman and a boy about the same age as Charlie, who were lying on their backs on striped beach towels. Carrie anchored the water bottle in the shade of the grass, which fringed the dip in the dune like eyelashes, and unpacked the swimming costumes. Then they took off their sand-laden shoes and walked to the sea. A day at the beach always began for them with this small act of homage.

The tide was coming in slowly and the sun glittered in patches where the water had gathered. The ridges of moist sand were so firm beneath their bare, car-softened feet that it was almost painful to walk. Charlie squatted down to examine the intricate piles of wormed sand and to hook up fragments of mussel shell with pruned fingers. His yellow shorts were too large round his waist, despite Carrie having sewn up an inch on either side, and when he ran he gathered them up with one hand to prevent them falling down. The perfectly blue sky stretched away, until it imperceptibly merged with the sea at a point so distant that it was impossible to see where sea ended and sky began. It felt as if you were walking in a thin membrane stretched to infinity. Although the day was warm, after a couple of weeks of overcast weather, the warmth hadn't yet found its way into the sea.

‘Can I go swimming?' asked Charlie, oblivious to the temperature. He threw himself forward in the shallows, kicking vigorously, churning up the sand, trying to tempt them in by pulling at their ankles. He was beginning to learn to swim, but still needed his inflatable wings. Carrie and Damian kept walking and Charlie splashed alongside them. It seemed as if the water would never get deeper and that the three of them would move forward forever. Hunger finally made them turn back to the beach. That, and the fact that Charlie's lips were turning blue. Damian lifted his son up and wrapped him in his shirt.

When they turned round and headed back for their spot in the dunes, they saw a flamingo standing in the water between them and the beach. Carrie thought at first it was a blow-up toy, too impossibly bright to be real. Its exotic shape and colour out of place in the pale, bleached landscape. But then it bent its neck and dipped its head repeatedly in the water.

‘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.