Page 87 of 59 Minutes

Epilogue

CARRIE

TEN YEARS AND NINE WEEKS AFTER THE ALERT

It is a beautiful day for letting go.

Carrie has barely slept and feels a drunken lightness as she rises from the bed and leans over to kiss Bunny, sleeping star-fished next to her with Barnaby in her hand.

Neither has mentioned it, but she’s slept in here every night since Ashley broke in, Carrie comforting Bunny the way she herself was once comforted.

And without words, both know that this will not be necessary in the new place.

Carrie climbs out of bed carefully, avoiding the boxes and tea chests.

The linen as old as her parents’ wedding is now bagged for charity.

They will buy bright new sheets tomorrow.

She slides into a blouse the colours of a sunset, and cream-coloured cigarette pants that skim her ankles.

Her new-start outfit, her Brighton look.

She had laid it out carefully last night, all her other clothes given to charity, or packed in boxes.

She has recently started to dress in colours again.

To wonder, and not stop herself as she always used to, what Emma would look like now and how she would dress, too.

By day, the soft blazers and jumpsuits she used to opt for?

Changing into comfies and slippers as soon as she got through the door?

And if she were here, would they be colouring the grey out of each other’s hair?

Emma finally trusting Carrie’s input? Would they be clinging to youth or embracing middle age?

Would they still be in London, or would they have moved back to Dartmoor and slowly turned into their mothers?

No, she thinks now, they would have done what she and Bunny are finally doing. What Emma wanted to do all along. A new life all of their own, all the ghosts blown away by the salty sea air.

Downstairs, Carrie opens the living-room shutters and presses her forehead to the glass. The dawning Dartmoor horizon is watercolour pink. Swirls of pale, clean mist lie across the curves of the uppermost fields like discarded lingerie.

In the kitchen, she boils the kettle and makes a proper pot of tea like her mum used to make. Leaves, not bags. Tea cosy older than her. She will have to wash all this up again, re-box it, but she has no regrets.

She pulls on her new lemon trench coat and slips outside to the garden where, mug in hand, she sits on the old bench near the stump of a cherry tree she had to get a tree surgeon to chop down because she could not bear to see it every day.

He was appalled at first and refused. It was illegal to destroy it, and morally wrong to slaughter a healthy tree.

After her faltering voice described how the wind had rippled through the pages of the book beneath a man’s gently swaying feet, as he swung from a tree just like that one, outside the community care centre in London, he did the work for free.

Carrie has left the treehouse she had built, which sits like a Farrow and Ball-painted watchtower in the old corner oak. The new owners have little kids who were excited to see it when they looked around. And besides, Bunny was never that bothered by it, it was there to assuage an old guilt.

Fit for a finale, the January sun sparkles across the frosty raised beds and the fields beyond, where an ancient path traces its way to Emma’s house. Mary’s house.

The last time Carrie dared to stand in those fields, it was with Emma in a purple urn.

But now Emma sits down beside her, pulls up one knee, rests her chin on it, and waits. By her side, a bucket of pick-and-mix.

‘Okay,’ Carrie says, as she always used to, ‘get ready for the download.’

She closes her eyes and tells Emma about Bunny, their cosy girl.

About her jokes and her messiness, how tall she is and how sweet.

About the ways she is like her Mummy, and all the ways she is like her Mama.

Her beauty and her silliness, how she makes anything fun, even the worst day of their lives. Just like Emma would. ‘Knock knock.’

She tells her, out loud – ‘They’ll have me sectioned if anyone hears me’ – about the ways the world has changed, and all the ways it has stayed the same.

Especially here, where they were formed, their childhoods crystalised around in-jokes and shared songs, howling at the same moon.

And she tells her that if she could do it all again, she would do it all with her.

That the pain of loss was a cost she would pay, over and over, for the time they had.

The removal lorry will be here soon and she is ready, finally ready, but she is enjoying here too.

Cup discarded on the rickety bench, she moves through the garden one last time.

Skips, twists, drops a shoulder, ducks to avoid a drooping raspberry cane stripped first by birds and finished by winter.

Carrie walks carefully now across the dew-wet grass.

These are her good shoes, and they’re slippery.

She feels overdressed, silly, but she was usually overdressed and always silly, back before …

before everything went wrong. She has had her hair bleached back to lemon sherbet, had it cut into a bob.

‘You look like the old photos of you,’ Bunny said. ‘I can sort of … I can sort of remember you.’

She will arrive in Brighton like this, and she will match the peach Bellini frontage of their new Kemptown house. They will step into a new life already ablaze with colour and sunshine.

Before they race their belongings to their new home, they have four final visits to make.

To Janet’s grave, to lay the last of the roses plucked during autumn, dried, preserved and tied in a black velvet ribbon.

To Mary, of course, who is still considering a move to the seaside herself.

A little flat, easy to manage. Not in Brighton, ‘the hubbub would kill me’ but in nearby Eastbourne.

It’s not an easy decision, her husband John and Emma are both buried here, she has a life outside of Carrie and Bunny, with a little gaggle of bustling friends.

And maybe Carrie and Mary have become too entwined, maybe the glue of guilt needs to flake away a little, if Carrie is to start again.

They have promised to call in to see Jasmine, though Bunny will communicate with her through her new phone non-stop and will see her when she comes back to visit.

And lastly, they will call in to the isolated farmhouse where Bunny’s other grandmother lives.

A cautious, breath-held meeting, Carrie hovering at the edge of her seat, everybody careful with this newborn and delicate thing.

But if Carrie cannot take all the credit for Bunny’s kindness, then Mrs Curtiss cannot shoulder all the blame for her sons’ cruelty.

The easiest thing is to apportion blame, but the kindest and bravest thing is to forgive.

And Carrie has chosen to forgive many other people.

She has forgiven Mrs Curtiss and the secret tunnels she dug to find her way to Bunny.

She has forgiven the people that hacked their way into the systems ten years ago.

She even forgives Ashley Curtiss, now facing another five years before he can even speak of parole, but living for the letters Bunny sends him.

But the hardest thing she has ever done, is what she does now. She raises a smile, smooths down her bright clothes, and decides to forgive herself.