When Carrie arrived at the shop at nine o’clock on Monday morning a large cast had already assembled. It seemed that Trove was developing into something of a drop-in centre, and glancing through the window as she locked up her bike, Carrie thought that it looked more like someone’s living room than a business. Enif was breakfasting in style from a bone china bowl in the centre of the floor, wearing what looked like some sort of tartan waistcoat. Paul was reclining in the lilac velvet armchair that Carrie had bought despite its scary price tag because she thought it would look great in the corner under the window and would provide somewhere to sit for people while their companions were trying things on. She saw with alarm that he had balanced his takeaway coffee cup on one of its sleek arms. Most worryingly of all she could see Pam wearing a pair of extremely high heels standing on the top of the stepladder, making jabs at the ceiling with a giant pink feather duster. Closing the door firmly against Little Bo Creep who had crept up behind her and was using his crook to get access to the basket of silk, beribboned knickers that had been placed rather unwisely by the entrance, Carrie looked around and spotted Jen who was sitting on the floor by the till in the midst of a sea of pink and cream tissue paper.
‘Good morning, Carrie,’ said Jen, ignoring Carrie’s somewhat aggressive stare. ‘I’m working on a new window display. It’s going to have a wedding theme.’
‘You might have consulted me. It’s hardly the time of year for …’ started Carrie crossly, but then seeing her friend’s stricken face, she relented. ‘Well, since it’s fast becoming your specialist subject … What are you doing here, Mum?’
Pam turned a bright face to her daughter and shook her feather duster, which moulted a cloud of feathers. ‘A spot of spring cleaning, darling,’ she said, ‘this place is going to wrack and ruin.’
After Enif and Paul had been despatched to hunt rabbits and stars and Carrie had sent her reluctant mother upstairs to do a stock check, Carrie and Jen spent the morning making the shop window look like wedding heaven. Jen had found a vintage dress on eBay in a soft, champagne-coloured brocade with a boat neckline and sparkling rhinestones round a full skirt and although it was too small to wear herself, she had decided it would make the perfect focus for a display and a cheery antidote to midwinter blues. The gown was pulled onto Dolly, the long-suffering shop dummy, who had resigned herself to a life of being mistreated by Jen. Dolly’s feet were encased in a pair of satin ballet pumps and she was dragged from the ground to stand in splendour on the raised platform. The floor around the dummy’s feet was littered with the cream and pink paper roses that Jen had made and Carrie cut outsized confetti shapes from paper doilies and stuck them all over the window. While they worked Carrie told Jen a little of what had happened between her and Oliver.
‘You really like him. Don’t you?’ said Jen.
‘I think he’s attractive. I’m just not sure he’s relationship material. Maybe I don’t really want a relationship. I don’t know.’
‘I’d be careful if I were you,’ said Jen. ‘You really need to look after yourself just now. After Damian and all this business with the medium and stuff, I’m just not sure you should be starting something with someone who lures people into sheds then seduces them.’
‘It was a hide, not a shed.’
‘Same difference,’ said Jen, ‘sounds furtive to me.’ And she stood on tiptoe to fix a little headpiece trimmed with a short net veil onto Dolly’s improbably blonde hair.
The two women went outside to look at the finished product through the window.
‘Very pretty,’ said Carrie. ‘The dress could do with straightening out a bit.’
Jen looked at her friend who was standing on one side of the window and then the other and squinting critically through the glass, and felt a warm rush of affection and admiration for her. Carrie was so beautiful and so stoical and Jen hoped that something good would happen for her soon. She herself felt so full of happiness and gratitude that she wanted her friend to be equally blessed.
‘What do you feel about what the medium said?’ asked Jen. She still believed that Simon Foster had somehow found out the information he needed to make his story convincing and had used a potent mix of theatrics, intuition and a sophisticated understanding of behaviour to find the words that Carrie wanted to hear. It wouldn’t have taken much, surely, for someone skilled in the mechanics of sadness to use the dropped clues, the small unconscious admissions to their own advantage. Nothing would convince her that Charlie could talk from beyond the grave, but she had supported Carrie throughout and would support her in this, even though she couldn’t understand it.
‘Hearing that he had drowned tore me up, but there was a part of me that felt something had been released in me, like the cork from a bottle. These later messages are much worse to listen to. I can’t bear to think of him suffering.’
‘But he’s not suffering now,’ said Jen. ‘He can’t be. I don’t think you should listen to Simon Foster any more.’
‘I can’t just leave it though. I can’t,’ said Carrie. ‘I can’t turn my back on him. This is truly the last of him. I feel him slipping away.’
As they went back into the shop, Carrie’s phone started ringing. Carrie listened for a minute and then rang off, her face white.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Jen.
‘Simon wants to see me,’ said Carrie. ‘Charlie has been sending some more messages.’
Pam, who had given up stocktaking and was sitting on an unopened box having a cup of tea, insisted that she go with her daughter. The taxi arrived almost immediately and fifteen minutes later, they were standing outside Simon’s flat.
‘The windows could do with a clean,’ muttered Pam, eyeing them disapprovingly, and Carrie rang on the bell.
Simon opened the door looking as if he hadn’t slept for a week. His pale eyes were shot through with veins, his shoulders were stooped, the lines on his face deeper than ever. Carrie noticed with alarm that even his usually immaculate clothes bore signs of neglect. His collar was dirty, his trousers stained. In the living room too there were signs of disturbance. The books had been turned over and there was just the faintest odour of food, some vegetable matter that had been left out too long that was now on the turn.
‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ said Simon, pushing some papers off the sofa to make room for them. ‘I haven’t been very well.’
‘Are you well enough to see us?’ asked Carrie. Something about the slightly-too-careful way that he was moving made Carrie think that he might have been drinking.
‘I needed to see you,’ he said. ‘I think he won’t ever leave me alone unless I can get you to understand what it is he is saying. The trouble is I don’t really understand it myself.’
Simon passed an unsteady hand back and forth across the top of his head as if to comfort himself.
‘His messages have become more and more frantic. He often shouts, and yesterday I actually think I saw him flash across the corner of my vision. It was quick, as if he was trying to jump.’
Carrie felt saliva gather in her mouth as if she might be sick.
‘What is he saying?’ asked Pam.
‘He talked about darkness and danger from a man. He started on again about not being able to breathe. A mother being hurt. The smell of water rising. Then he kept repeating tell her, tell her, tell her she has to save Max.’
Simon got up, bent over Carrie and touched her on the hand. She could smell alcohol on his breath and she looked up into his washed-out eyes.
‘He told me to tell you he loves you every single day,’ said Simon, and Carrie felt her heart contract as if it had been punched.
‘Why is he talking about Max?’ asked Carrie.
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon sitting back down. The reporting of the messages seemed to offer him some relief. He rested his head against the back of his chair and shut his eyes.
‘You look terrible. You need a stiff drink,’ Pam said, bossily taking Carrie’s arm and almost pushing her through the door of the first pub they came to. They drank several glasses of red wine, and were both quite drunk by the time they resumed their walk home. Pam got the heel of one of her teetering shoes stuck in a drain and broke it.
‘Oh bloody hell,’ she said, trying without success to reattach it.
‘Marilyn Monroe did it on purpose,’ said Pam as she almost turned her ankle trying to negotiate the edge of the pavement. ‘She chopped a bit off the heel of one of her shoes. It’s what gave her that famous sexy wiggle.’
‘Why don’t you just pull the other one off and even yourself out?’ said Carrie.
‘I’m getting this heel repaired and I’m not paying to have both of them fixed when I only broke one,’ said Pam indignantly.
Carrie needed all her concentration to work out where the lampposts were positioned. The message from Charlie had hit her hard. She remembered all too clearly what her last words to her son had been. They were words that they had often said to each other, a kind of incantation to ward off evil. She felt absolutely exhausted, as if she no longer had the strength to feel anything at all. She imagined her body finally giving up under the pressure and crumpling like those pictures of cars that have driven into lorries, when you can’t believe anyone has got out alive because there isn’t anything recognisable left in the concertinaed metal.
When she got home Pam made her a cup of coffee and Carrie went to the drawer in her room where she had put the last photos of Charlie from her old camera. She lay down on her bed and curled her body around a pillow. She felt she needed to be careful with herself if she was to avoid further harm. The images tore at her all over again. She hated above all the fact that already they had begun to seem out of date. It wouldn’t be long before someone would look at Charlie’s hair, the style of his shorts, even the quality of the colour in the images and think of them as old, just as she did when she flipped through pictures in antique shops; piers that had long ago melted into the sea, family groups lined up outside shuttered shop frontages, children wearing strange-shaped collars and stilted smiles.
The last photograph in the pack was the one with Max in it. She had a sudden image of running up to him that day in the midst of her terror and asking him if he had seen Charlie. Was there some particular significance in this moment that she had failed to register because she had been in such mortal terror? In the photograph he was sitting on a towel looking straight at the camera with Charlie in the foreground. Because he wasn’t at the centre of the picture, his face was a little out of focus, but it was still clear enough. Right at the edge of the photograph was Molly, her hair held back by a scarf tied into a bow, her face in profile. She was opening a picnic basket or a beach bag. Max had very distinctive, almond-shaped eyes and ears that stood enough away from the side of his head for other children to have surely drawn attention to them. Children had an unerring ability to seek out the soft, unprotected spots of others. That was how children survived; their mothers opened up their softest spots and let them settle in there, recklessly heedless of the pain they knew would follow as a result of making themselves so vulnerable. He looked anxious. He certainly didn’t have the face of a carefree child. She thought of the way he had stood so still in the shop, allowing her to hold him, as if he knew that it was comforting her. She felt a great, unexpected surge of anger against Charlie. She was shocked by the strength of the feeling that engulfed her. He had broken her heart and devastated her life and now he was tormenting her with messages she didn’t understand. The dead were supposed to send messages of comfort to the living weren’t they? Not cryptic warnings about children she hardly knew. Her anger gave her some respite from hearing the sound of his voice, and with the photographs still littered around her and with tears drying on her face, Carrie fell asleep. Pam, tiptoeing in a short while later, covered her with the duvet and drew the bedroom curtains.
Carrie dreamed she was back on the beach. She was making the walk out towards the horizon but this time she was alone. Everything else was as it had been. The sun containing within its tentative warmth a warning of incoming clouds, the sand giving slightly as she walked, emptying itself of moisture under the weight so that each footstep left a ghost of itself. When she came to the edge of the sea where the water sucked in and out, she rolled up her trousers and went in. Just ahead of her a child in yellow shorts was floating face down, moving slowly, rocked by the gentle rise and fall of the waves. Carrie ran towards him, but although she was soon up to her waist, she wasn’t any closer. He drifted just out of her reach. She could feel the tug of the water, could sense its dangerous lure and she allowed herself to be taken, until she too was as light as flotsam on the waves. She floated out until she reached him and to her immense joy she could feel that he was alive. The pulse was leaping in his narrow neck and when she held him close she could feel his heart pumping. She used all her strength to pull him back to the shore, holding him around his neck and swimming beneath him and eventually arrived, gasping on the sand. When she turned towards him she saw Max lying looking at her.