Someone to Watch Over Me (15 page)

‘They don't know for sure, of course. It's a description that would fit a lot of boys that age,' Damian said, seeing her face. ‘It's almost certainly not him. You understand that don't you, Carrie? Don't you?' he said as she gathered her coat and bag and looked at herself in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair.

The only time that Carrie had been in the police station had been years ago to report the theft of a bike from outside the Grafton centre. Now she thought she would be happy if someone would take her present disaster of a bike off her hands so that she could buy a replacement that actually worked. She suspected that even if she left it unlocked with a note on it saying ‘please take me', it would still be there when she returned a week later. She knew she was thinking of random things to stop her dwelling on what she was about to see. A detective who looked like the young Kevin Costner came out into the lobby to meet them. He was dressed in a dark, well-cut suit and was clearly unfamiliar with the doughnut. To her horror, Carrie heard the theme tune from
The Bodyguard
start up in her head.

Damian and Carrie were ushered into an office where a comfortingly traditional copper with big ears was sitting at a computer. Kevin Costner spoke in short sentences as if to forestall any possible manifestation of emotion.

‘Now I don't want you to get your hopes up,' he said. ‘It's extremely unlikely that the images you are going to see are of your son. We have no idea where this young boy is from. He could be from anywhere in the world. We just need to check to be absolutely sure that it isn't Charlie. Would you like to sit down? Perhaps you would prefer it if your husband looked first …'

Carrie shook her head. She needed to see this and she could only see it if she stayed standing up. She thought that sitting down would in some way weaken her. Kevin Costner was speaking again in his cool voice. ‘I need for you to look very closely at this set of images. I'm sorry, but some of them are a bit upsetting, although we have done our best to disguise what's happening.'

The policeman with the big ears apologetically scrolled down the screen and stopped when a set of five images appeared. He indicated awkwardly that Carrie and Damian should come closer, looking as if he would rather be anywhere than where he was. He kept rubbing his hand against his chest as if he had a pain there.

The first image showed a blond boy standing bare-chested in what looked like a hotel room. Behind him there was striped wallpaper and a wall light. The boy had huge, surprised eyes and his hands were closely pressed to his sides. In the second picture the boy was lying on a yellow covered bed and someone was holding him down. You could tell how small the boy was because of the size of the hands pushing against him. In the third image the boy was lying curled up on his side, naked, with a rope around one ankle, which led away and out of the picture. Carrie couldn't look at the fourth and fifth picture. There was no air in the room and she couldn't breathe.

‘I need a glass of water,' she said, and it sounded to her as if her voice was coming from a long way away. She turned and walked out of the room. None of the pictures were of Charlie. They were of a boy about the same age as Charlie with the same pale skin and fair hair, maybe even the same rounded eyebrows that she loved so much, but it wasn't him. Some other mother somewhere was mourning this child with his tight little fists and his astonished eyes.

Carrie bent over the drinking fountain in the lobby and took several great gulping mouthfuls of water and then went and sat on the plastic chair that had been placed discouragingly by the entrance. She thought about the hands pushing down on the small, pale chest and she started to cry.

Damian and Carrie walked across Parkers Piece in silence. It had snowed during the night and children had already scooped up the meagre ground cover and fashioned diminutive snowmen that were pock-marked with mud. A few seagulls wandered between the figures as if they had lost their way and were looking for the shoreline. They went into the first pub they came to and sat at a corner table next to the fireplace.

‘I'm sorry you had to go through that,' Damian said, putting a large brandy down next to her.

‘I feel ashamed,' said Carrie. ‘I feel ashamed that I hated that pathetic little boy because he wasn't Charlie. Will they be able to find him?'

‘Who?' asked Damian and took a long drink of beer.

‘The boy in the pictures. Will they find him and take him home?'

‘I don't know, Carrie. Maybe. He looked like Charlie a bit didn't he?'

‘Fucking bastards,' she said and Damian stroked the side of her face gently. She leaned against him and was surprised that even after all this time it felt like a natural thing to do.

‘Do you think of him still?' she asked.

‘All the time,' Damian said.

‘I think of him in the morning when I wake,' Carrie said. ‘I think of him when I see something he liked or that made him laugh. I think of him when I feel sad or when I think I might be feeling happy. I think of him before I go to sleep and when I wake in the night. I think of him in every turn of a child's head. Every cry. Every laugh.'

Pam was out, otherwise the afternoon might have turned out differently. As it was, Carrie thought later that it was sadness that made her lead Damian up her narrow staircase and into her tiny bedroom with its balcony over the garden. She took off her clothes, dropping them in a pile by the bed and got under the covers quickly, shivering slightly as her skin made contact with the chilly sheets. Damian knelt by the bed and kissed her on the mouth.

‘I don't know if this is such a good idea,' he said. He lay on the bed next to her, his dressed body held away from her as if he was waiting for an answer. Carrie stroked him through his jeans until she could feel him harden against her hand. She sat up and pulled the unfamiliar jumper off his long body and kissed the base of his throat. They were careful of each other, as if sudden movements or too much haste would cause each other pain.

Afterwards they fell asleep, spooned together in the soft afternoon light.

A week after Christmas, Pam produced the leaflet as if she was presenting Carrie with a particularly wonderful surprise. Carrie had been rather grumpily making breakfast while her mother did what she usually did, which was recline upon the sofa, directing proceedings in a vague, but persistent way. Fond though she was of her, Carrie sometimes felt that being with her mother was akin to being trapped in a glass jar with a midge. She was also wondering how she might bring up the subject of how long her mother intended to stay without offending her. Pam had been talking rather ominously about the pair of them ‘going somewhere lovely in the New Year', which seemed to suggest that she had no immediate plans to return home to Coventry.

‘I wouldn't mind a little pancake,' said Pam, ‘if you're making. One of those American ones with a drizzle of maple syrup.'

‘I haven't got any maple syrup,' snapped Carrie, banging the frying pan down on the hob. Her mother was irritating, but the thing that was really bugging her was what she was going to do about Damian. When they had woken up from their shared afternoon sleep, he had seemed embarrassed and had dressed and left quickly, but since then he had texted her twice and left a message on her voicemail asking if he could see her again.

‘It felt right, Carrie,' he said. ‘Did it feel right to you too?'

She didn't really know the answer to that question. Being with Damian had been comforting and she had been surprised by how much she had wanted him, but she wasn't sure it was enough to start it all again and maybe cause pain, not least to the person who had been buying Damian expensive jumpers.

‘I think we should go,' said Pam, breaking into her thoughts.

‘Go where?'

‘To this … haven't you been listening? I've always wanted to go and see a medium,' said Pam, waving a familiar-looking yellow leaflet in the air.

‘It's a sign. Yesterday two women in the shop were talking about having gone to see him, and now I find this when I was putting the recycling out. We have to go.'

‘No we bloody don't,' Carrie retorted.

‘It might help …'

‘I'm not going to see a con artist who uses people's suffering to make money.'

‘You don't know he's a con artist,' said Pam. ‘It says here that although he could fill large theatres, he prefers to work with smaller groups of people.'

‘It's just exploiting people's stupidity. It's cynical and I hate it,' said Carrie, mixing the pancake batter rather too forcefully.

‘He's hardly charging anything. Just a fiver. Apparently he has worked with the police.'

‘I don't believe in all of that,' said Carrie, her soft mouth pulled into a hard line.

‘I never thought you'd turn out to be someone with such a shut mind. When you were a little girl you were so curious and enquiring,' said Pam sadly.

‘Yeah, I was mostly enquiring about why my mum never seemed to be around.'

‘You never used to be so cruel either,' said Pam with the special wounded face she used when she could smell victory.

That evening, Carrie found herself sitting in a small side room at a community centre in Romsey. Pam, dressed in sombre grey in honour of the occasion, with just a touch of pink in the scarf wrapped round her throat, was moving excitedly around in her chair.

‘Stop wriggling,' hissed Carrie. ‘I can't believe you've made me come here.'

Looking around her at the other participants, Carrie rather uncharitably thought they were exactly the kind of deluded and credulous people who would be interested in seeing a medium: the aged, the mentally challenged and the badly dressed. There was an elderly woman who was so thin you could have hung her on a coat rack by the back of her jumper, a mother and daughter who both had the slightly protuberant eyes of the terminally gullible, a man who kept blowing his nose who was clearly already close to tears, and another middle-aged woman who seemed held together only by the tightness of the fastenings on her clothes. She sat bolt upright, her coat buttoned all the way up to her chin, her neck wrapped in a scarf so tight it looked as if it was restricting her breathing. The last of their merry band was a young girl with a pale, narrow face and extremely long hair. Carrie thought sourly that she probably thought that having hair that you could sit on was a source of pride, rather than the sad and creepy state of affairs it in fact was.

Just when Carrie had decided she was going to bolt and leave her mother to it, the door opened and Simon Foster came in. For some reason Carrie had imagined that he might be fleshier, more theatrical, but this man was spare and slow in his movements. She guessed that he must be in his late fifties or early sixties. It was difficult to tell his age because although his body looked hard and well maintained, he had deep furrows between his eyes and along the side of his mouth and his skin was coarse, as if he might have spent a lot of time out of doors. His grey hair was cut very short, almost shaved, and he wore a navy sweater and dark trousers. He walked over to the circle of chairs and took his place at the one remaining empty seat. He smiled round at them.

‘Hello everyone. I'm Simon Foster. I'm what is called a psychic medium.' His voice was soft, but slightly clipped, as if he hadn't quite been able to eradicate a former way of speaking.

‘I thought I would tell you a little bit about myself and also about what to expect from our session here today.' Carrie noticed his hands with their slim fingers were crossed in his lap, apparently relaxed, but that every now and again, his hands would move suddenly in a small jerking motion as if he was warding something off.

‘I come from an army family,' he said. ‘My father was a Major General and it was very much taken for granted that that was the way my life was going to go too. When I was seven I was involved in a serious car accident and I almost died. My heart stopped three times but somehow I survived. My mother wasn't so lucky. She died after being in a coma for a month. Soon after the accident, when I was still convalescing, I started to notice that I could tell when things were going to happen. They weren't important things. Just knowing when a door was going to open before it did, or guessing what someone was going to say before they said it.'

At this point in his narrative Pam jabbed Carrie excitedly in the ribs and the long-haired girl gave an audible gasp. Carrie, who had for a moment forgotten her impatience because she had been absorbed in his story, reminded herself of just what this man was claiming he could do. He might not be the sort of charlatan she had envisaged, but charlatan he obviously still was.

‘By the time I was eight, my experiences had grown much more intense and in addition to my premonitions, I began to hear voices. The voices frightened me because I didn't know if they were coming from inside me or outside me. In the end I told my father who referred me to a doctor who thought that perhaps the voices were a physical symptom caused by the head injury I had sustained during my accident.' Simon Foster got up and continued his story leaning on the back of his chair. Carrie was struck by the paleness of his eyes, which were such a light blue that there was hardly any differentiation between his iris and the white of his eyes.

‘The voices didn't go away. Sometimes they left me for a while, but they always came back and as I got older I understood that the voices I could hear were the voices of the dead. By the time I came to this realisation, I was so used to living with it that it didn't come as the shock you might expect. The worst of it was that sometimes I got very little peace and during particularly intense periods I would suffer terrible migraines. Something that still happens to me at regular intervals. I followed the path that was expected of me. I tried not to let the voices intrude too much and the more active I was, the less I heard them. In the end I could control them to such an extent that it was only when I allowed myself to become consciously calm that I heard them at all. I went to boarding school, and then Sandhurst, and by the late seventies was serving as an intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. The work was by turns boring and terrifying because we were always waiting for something to happen and we were never sure what it might be. People I knew and worked with began to die. I found it harder and harder to control the voices. We were all contending with the danger of bombs and snipers and the sense we were not wanted, but I was also having to deal with the clamour of the dead.'