Page 85 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
ONE YEAR AFTER THE ALERT ST JAMES’S PARK
Carrie’s vision swirls, The D, E and F names twisting and dissolving, until she looks down at her feet instead. This oval wall is huge, a great slab of stone and metal, eye-shaped from above. She backs away, nauseated by the sheer scale.
Before she leaves, she must visit her mother’s name.
Her mother whose death did not stand on its own merits at first, but simply compounded the loss and guilt Carrie was already feeling so that, only now, really, is Carrie starting to recognise the depth of that unique grief.
The loss of her only remaining parent, the loss of a safety net, of the only two people who witnessed her childhood close up. Her baby years.
As an orphan, albeit an adult one, does part of her cease to exist?
Now Carrie follows the wide walkway around, past the Gs, Hs and Is and on through the letters, turning past M and then back around the other side.
At R, suddenly dizzy, she stops and grips the handrail that runs alongside the edge of the plinth.
When this wall was first built, a young man drowned himself here.
If it wasn’t for Clementine, would she have thrown herself in the lake like that man?
Yes. She absolutely would. Maybe that man’s partner died that day too.
Maybe that man killed them. Either way, she didn’t dare read any of the coverage that followed.
As the papers raked through his story, she backed away from the headlines.
She couldn’t take on anyone else’s grief.
There was also a risk of hardening herself to other people’s suffering, simply through over-exposure. And that wouldn’t do either.
Further up the lake, a duck flips itself over, fluffy nappy-like bum poking up and head in the water. That is me, Carrie thinks, that is how I will survive.
There is a woman hovering near the edge of the lake, holding a spray of flowers which she cradles like a baby.
The flowers are dead, or dried, and this unnerves Carrie, the not-quite-rightness of it eerie in this half-light of early morning.
Carrie steps closer to S, for Spencer, just as the woman steps closer to the S-T-U bridge.
They both stop. The woman is swaying slightly, back and forth.
A maternal sway that has never fully left Carrie either.
Arms that have cradled a baby never fully forget their job.
The woman is slightly taller than Carrie and maybe a few years older.
She wears a long black double-breasted military coat with gold buttons.
A black scarf bursts from her neck, black and white Converse high tops stick out beneath the hem of her coat.
Her dark hair is in a messy bun, the stylish kind Carrie has never been able to do.
She’s not even sure what she looks like right now, unmade, pasty face, dishwater hair? She doesn’t care and hasn’t for a year.
She looks down at her own clothes and is momentarily surprised by her black puffy jacket and jeans.
Accidentally, a different version of the same outfit she wore a year ago today.
She wants to tear it off and burn it like she tore off and threw away last year’s clothes.
She tugs at her own sleeve and when she looks up, the woman is staring at her, pale-faced.
‘Oh, shit … I don’t believe it,’ she says, with flat northern vowels. ‘You’re Carrie.’