Someone to Watch Over Me by Madeleine Reiss Read Free Book Online

terrible, cruel punishment. When she finally slept she dreamt of him, arms stretched out, floating on the crest of waves.
    Putting her head to one side as if she had a crick in her neck, their counsellor stressed the importance of talking to each other about their feelings. ‘Grieve together,’ she told them in the tone of someone recommending a course of healthy exercise. The trouble was that Carrie’s way of grieving was nothing like Damian’s. Whereas she wanted to go over what had happened again and again, as if by repetition some sense would be made of the completely incomprehensible, he preferred to keep moving. He fixed the loose fence. He emptied out the shed. He sorted his CDs into alphabetical order. Then he decided he should go back to work.
    â€˜It’s not doing either of us any good, sitting in the house,’ Damian said, as she lay watching him getting dressed. He paused over his selection of ties, choosing one with a thin navy stripe. It was this slight hesitation while his hand hovered over the tie rack that so astonished Carrie and made her realise how alone they both were. On the days she had bothered to get dressed at all, Carrie had simply pulled on the same black sweater, the same jeans. Part of her knew that he selected one tie over another not because he cared about which tie he wore but simply because this little morning ritual was comfortingly familiar to him – but at the same time she felt excluded by his apparent control which seemed to her so much like coldness.
    Damian took to saying that he had stayed on at the office to finish work, but when he came home his clothes were impregnated with the metallic smell of the city at night, a taint that you seemed to absorb when you walked for any length of time by the edges of roads. He avoided coming to bed at the same time as her, choosing instead to sit watching TV late into the night, while she lay silently in Charlie’s bunk bed. When she was brought home from a store in town, because she had been found in the children’s department, her arms full of small shorts and gaily coloured T-shirts, crying square-mouthed at the enormity of her loss, he was impatient with her.
    â€˜You have to move on,’ he said but she didn’t know where there was to go.
    â€˜Talk to me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me how he was. Tell me some of the things he did.’
    â€˜I can’t,’ he replied, but she couldn’t stop herself.
    â€˜Do you remember how when he was a baby his whole naked body used to shake when we trailed a muslin over his stomach?’ she said. ‘Do you remember the way he would hook raisins out of those tiny boxes with a bent finger and make a strange growling noise as he did it?’
    Even worse than the way she wanted to talk about Charlie all the time, was the way Carrie picked away at the sequence of events that led to their son’s disappearance. She reminded him of a bear he had seen years ago in a Spanish zoo walking forwards and backwards endlessly in its concrete canyon. She couldn’t let it rest, but carried on down the same groove that gave them both nothing but pain.
    â€˜I slept. Damian. I slept. How could I sleep? Everyone knows that when you are looking after children on a beach, you can’t take your eyes off them, even for a minute. Tell me, how could I sleep?’ Each time she asked him she would look at him with the same wide-eyed incredulity. At first he felt pity for her and felt his own astonishment mirrored in her face, but when she asked him again and again he was maddened by her and no longer had the strength to spare her. It seemed that there was no way for them to help each other. It seemed that in suffering so differently they made each other’s pain worse.
    One night he found her standing in Charlie’s room. He came up and touched her on the shoulder and she spun round at him.
    â€˜WHERE IS HE?’ she shouted, her fingers pulling