Page 46 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
Carrie passes a community care centre that has an amputee rehabilitation unit inside. Have all the doctors and nurses stayed with their patients or fled to be with their own children and loved ones?
A little way up the road, a man’s lifeless body swings gently from a tough little cherry tree. At his feet, a book lies open, the wind ruffling its pages. Carrie gasps but she does not slow down.
Carrie staggers down Bird Walk, a narrow path between the tall, terraced houses.
She comes out by a primary school, where what looks like an after-school club of children is cowering in the hall, its windows still uncovered.
A man who has been running alongside her, barely noticed, peels away and jumps onto the fence, shouting his child’s name.
‘Reuben!’ He monkeys up and over the wire fence like it’s nothing.
As she runs on, chest tightening and throat so dry she’s open-mouth coughing, she hears a little voice from inside the school shouting, ‘Daddy!’
She thinks, of course, of Clementine. Of soft brown curls whorling out of a double crown, the thumb she sucks when she’s tired. The sweet smell of her when they wake her up, the way she wipes the sleep from her eyes like a baby animal.
That little cub is too young to remember this lovely life.
Clementine will never know how good we had it.
Cars line both sides of this street. How are there so many cars when no one in London drives? Her feet are on fire, soles aching from thumping along the pavement in fashion trainers.
She thinks of Grace and draws strength from the memory.
How Beverley must have thought her daughter wasn’t coming home and yet she waited, watching, hoping …
and it paid off. Now Grace is home, with her mum and little brother.
So it’s not impossible. Which is proof that Carrie can reach Clementine and Emma.
How many times in her life has she run like fury to the comfort of Emma and her house?
When her mother Janet’s grief rose like damp up the walls of their home and Carrie could do nothing to help.
Poor Mum, how hard it must be to be suddenly alone.
Dad was Mum’s best friend, to lose a love like that …
I have a love like that. I cannot lose it. She cannot lose me.
Because Emma is home. More than Carrie’s mother’s house is home. Clementine and Emma are home. And they’re home together. They’re home together. They’re home together.
The mantra settles alongside the rhythm of her painful feet on the pavement as she runs past apartment buildings with boxy balconies where a huge Malamute dog paces around the small space, his howls more human than animal.
They’ll bring him inside before … won’t they? Surely? She’s stopped without realising, looking up at his big wolfy face as he stuffs his snout through the balustrades.
Yes, they will bring him in, she decides, sucking in a deep breath, running on and then vomiting.
No warning, just a sudden surge, the hot slap of it hitting the floor followed by an acidic aftertaste afterwards.
It’s as if her body knows she’s nearly home and everything it’s been holding on to is loosening.
But I’m not home yet, stupid body.
‘You alright, darling?’
Carrie looks around but the street is empty.
‘Up here, love.’
She steps away from the apartment block and looks up.
‘That’s it, bit further.’
She looks up again. To the balconies running along the second floor.
A woman of at least seventy, maybe more, sits on a deck chair.
She wears a cream fur coat and bright-blue rimmed glasses, her lips bold red against powdery pale skin.
In one hand she grips a tall glass with a cocktail umbrella and in the other is a thick cigar.
‘Better out than in,’ she says and takes a puff. ‘You wanna come up?’
‘What?’
‘You wanna come up and have a drink, a bit of company? Use the loo?’
‘Oh, thank you so much, but—’ Carrie turns away, looking in the rough direction of her home.
‘You got people?’ the woman calls down.
‘I have.’
‘Nice people?’ The woman’s accent is born and bred Lambeth and Carrie loves it.
‘The best,’ Carrie says, and allows herself a smile.
‘S’what it’s all about then.’
‘Do you have people?’ Carrie calls up.
‘I had the best person in the world for nearly fifty years,’ the woman calls down and takes a long sip of her drink. ‘Can’t say fairer than that.’
She puffs her cigar. ‘I’m going to drink to him and watch the fireworks. Sure you don’t wanna join me?’
‘I need to get to my people,’ Carrie says, ‘but thank you.’
‘Then I’ll drink to you too, love. Godspeed, darling.’