Read Someone to Watch Over Me for Free Online Page B

held her hand and rubbed her fingers as if against frostbite.
    â€˜There’s no point. Come on home now. Come on,’ said Damian, his face grey in the thin light.
    â€˜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 bend, as if she was being consumed by fire. She writhed on the bed wrapping the sheets around her hands and arms, unable to stop pulling against them. She didn’t sleep or eat for three days and nights. Instead she sat by the phone, willing it to ring, and then trembling in dread when it did. On the fourth day, she drove back to the beach and sat, fully dressed, in the sea. Damian, who had been at the police station, returned to find her gone and drove to the spot he knew he would surely find her. When he approached her she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. He led her past families eating their lunch unheedingly through another perfect summer’s day.
    At night she sat in Charlie’s room holding on to his pillow and the smell of him. Every day a policeman trained to keep his voice solicitous found new ways of telling them there was nothing to tell. Two weeks after Charlie disappeared, some yellow shorts were found on a beach further round the coast. The careful policeman brought them round in a plastic bag and placed them on the edge of the kitchen table. Carrie saw her own stitching in the waistband. She felt as if she was looking at something from another age. A kind of relic.
    Then there was nothing else. He didn’t turn up buried in the dunes or washed up on the shore. He had vanished. A woman rang the police and claimed she had seen a boy that looked like Charlie with a man on a bus, but it turned out that that she was well known for seeing the missing and murdered. She had once claimed to have seen a whole family on a fairground carousel, eating ice cream. It transpired that their father had killed them all the week before.
    At first Carrie didn’t want any news. No news meant that he might still be somewhere. Her mind threw up the pictures that had been imprinted from television footage and the retrospective chill of CCTV. She thought with horror of flickering computer screens and men with a taste for the pale, thin bodies of children. She imagined her boy in the back of a lorry on a mattress, perhaps with other children, being taken a long way away where he would never be found. She could see him dressed in unfamiliar clothes, sitting on the edge of beds in strange rooms. Sometimes she saw him in the clearings of woods, in shallow graves with soil only just covering his pale, purplish eyelids. As the days passed into weeks, not knowing where he was began to be the chief source of her pain. And all the time what wore away at her was the knowledge that his going had been her fault. She had fallen asleep on her watch and he had suffered for her negligence. She had not done her job and this was her