Someone to Watch Over Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

barely talk.
    â€˜I’d better go and tell the lifeguard. You stay here. You have to be here in case he comes back. It’s alright. We’ll find him. We’ll find him, Carrie.’
    Carrie stood and waited. She looked around her, turning from side to side. The empty world stretched out in front of her and she heard herself panting. Breath in, breath out. Where was he? Where was he? She picked up the fleece that Charlie had left half buried in the sand and held it to her face.
    They sent two helicopters and little crowds gathered, thrilled by the glamour of impending disaster. ‘He’s how old?’ they asked, so that they could be part of the drama. They watched the boat go out with a kind of awe. Afterwards, when they got home, still sticky with salt and sand, they would talk about it in hushed tones with half an eye on their own, safe children and turn on the news, hoping for the end of the story. Some people stayed and organised themselves into lines and walked methodically across the dunes as far as the car park and then back again. Some of them had sticks, and Carrie thought suddenly of similar lines of people going across a moor, turning over the heather for clues. The boat moved slowly across the water as if it had all the time in the world.
    It started to get dark, but Carrie still stood waiting on the beach. Damian wanted her to go into the lifeguard’s hut and have a hot drink but she had to stay where Charlie could find her.
    â€˜Come on, Carrie, there’s nothing you can do …’
    Someone had given her a coat to wear, but she was still shaking. She couldn’t feel her body but it was moving strangely, as if she no longer had any control. He would come, if she waited long enough. He would surely come. It was inconceivable that he wouldn’t. How could she leave this place without him? He would put his arms around her neck and she would lift him off the ground and hold him close and smell the salt on his warm skin.

Chapter Six
    The first day in the shop was a huge success. The story that Carrie had managed to muscle into the local paper and the fliers she and Jen had stuffed through countless letterboxes had done the trick and there had been a steady stream of customers, most of whom hadn’t left without purchasing at least something. They had opened
Trove
at just the right time to catch the pre-Christmas buying frenzy. Carrie liked to think that it catered for all tastes; a necklace strung with silver filigree butterflies and seed pearls for the girl who had everything, or an old leather-bound volume of sea birds for the father who claimed not to want anything at all.
    To Carrie’s amazement, it turned out that Jen was an incredible salesperson. She might look as if she got herself dressed in the dark, but when it came to other people she knew exactly when to suggest a colourful accessory or to wait outside the changing room and turn disaster into triumph with the perfect garment for diminishing hips or emphasising lovely legs. ‘Everyone has something beautiful about them,’ she announced grandly, the effect of her words in no way diminished by the mince pie crumbs that had attached themselves to her frontage. Carrie watched, amazed as she sold a vibrant red cloche hat to a timid-looking young girl in beige who left the shop grinning from ear to ear, ‘You look like a forties heroine, darling’; a cerise and black lace basque to a man who had come in looking for a bath set for his wife’s birthday, ‘Lingerie, so much more adventurous don’t you think?’; and a set of vintage cushions covered in blowsy cabbage roses to a woman who had described her house as minimalist. ‘There’s only so much white a body can live with, after all.’
    At around four o’clock, a group of carol singers from the local school gathered outside the shop, and Carrie and Jen propped open the door and stood on the step to hear a somewhat