The Personal Shopper (Annie Valentine)

by Carmen Reid

  She watched her feet moving for a while, clumpy in the brand new navy hiking boots. Put one foot in front of the other, as Ed had instructed. She tried to concentrate hard on this rather than think too much about where they were heading. It wasn’t a difficult walk. The path was about three feet wide and stony: it was damp but only very slightly slippery.

  As they got higher, every so often she lifted her head to take in the view, which was much more pleasant than she’d expected. As the drizzle began to lift, she could make out calm, green hills and valleys stretching out ahead of them. Where sunlight had broken through the clouds in the distance, roads, cars and windows gleamed gold.

  She was also on the lookout for some clue that they were in the right place, although she had no idea what this clue was going to be.

  She had expected to feel very anxious up here, panicky even . . . so close to Roddy. About to see the place where . . .

  But she was surprised to find that a sense of calm had come over her. The act of walking was helping. As she walked on and gradually up, she felt a growing sense of purpose.

  She looked back at Owen and Lana and wondered what they were thinking. Owen broke into a jog; he quickly pulled up level with her, then flashed her a smile before passing.

  ‘Are you going to be first to the top?’ she asked him, cheered by the irrepressible fun he was managing to squeeze from this.

  ‘Definitely,’ he called back over his shoulder. His red anorak was unzipped and flapped in the wind behind him as he jogged on ahead.

  She automatically wanted to call out to him: Be careful, but she didn’t.

  They had been walking for about fifty minutes and seemed to be making good time towards the summit when Owen, eighty feet or so ahead of her, called out: ‘Muuum! Mum, come and look at this!’

  Annie, Lana and Ed hurried up the pathway to reach him and followed his pointing finger to a colourful bundle propped next to a large grey boulder. The side of the hill was much steeper here, so if they wanted to take a closer look they would have to scramble carefully down the grass.

  ‘Owen!’ Annie called out to steady her son, who’d already left the path and was crawling his way down backwards: hands, knees and toecaps in the grass for grip.

  ‘I think he’ll be OK,’ Ed reassured her, climbing down from the path himself and holding out a hand to Lana, who clearly wanted to join them. ‘It’s grassy, but I don’t think it’ll be too slippery.’

  So all four of them moved, sliding and crawling, down the steep bank towards the stone. Annie wondered how on earth she’d got herself into this . . . and how would they ever get back up?

  By the time she made it down to the boulder, the colourful bundle had come into focus as a weatherbeaten bunch of flowers. Owen had picked it up and as Lana scrutinized the wrapping paper, Ed stood at a distance, not wanting to intrude.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ Annie asked and Owen put the wet bundle into her hands. About ten days ago, or so, this had been a sensational bunch of flowers. The significance of the date was not lost on her.

  The bunch was sodden wet and browning. These had once been fat pink and orange roses, prettily arranged with evergreen branches. The smart cellophane was shredded in places, but Annie could make out a London, WC1 postcode.

  She was certain this had something to do with Roddy. At the inquest, it had been stated that no other serious accident had happened on Even Ridge in living memory; unless there had been something since, of course.

  Lana pointed down into the flower stems: ‘Look, there’s a card.’

  Annie peeled back the wrapper and brought out a small silver envelope. For a moment she didn’t know if she dared. What if this was something she didn’t know about? Shouldn’t know about? What if it was private to Roddy? Or even to do with someone else entirely?

  But Owen and Lana were crowding close and urging her on, so she put a fingernail under the miniature flap and pulled out a tiny white card no more than two inches square. Scribbled over the front and back in a handwriting she recognized were the words:

  The third anniversary, my friend . . . Three

  whole years since we lost you. I just hope wherever

  you are that you have some idea how

  much we all miss you.

  Annie stared at the card. The words were blurring and she knew she would have to take rapid tear intervention action immediately.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ Owen wanted to know.

  ‘It’s from Connor, isn’t it?’ came from Lana.

  Annie just nodded and could feel the tears overflow.

  ‘Yes,’ she managed.

  ‘Did Daddy fall off the path and hit his head here?’ Owen asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was down to a husky whisper. ‘He was so unlucky, babes, so very, very unlucky.’

  Unlucky . . . this was the way she chose to describe it now. There was nothing to be gained from thinking about whether it was ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’. She had only come to realize this after long and pointless hours raging about how unfair it had been.

  Why had Connor never told her he was making this journey? Had he made it the years before as well? She tucked the card into the flowers, then carefully placed the bunch back at the foot of the stone, moved to tears by Connor’s gesture.

  Now she suspected they were going to have to do the thing she’d been dreading, halfway up a hillside with the odd passer-by to see them. They were going to have to huddle together and cry.

  With her nose pressed into the top of Lana’s head, with Owen tucked in against her cagoule, they cried together.

  She thought at first she would just have a short cry: a let it out, blow nose, then move back to the path sort of thing.

  She thought she had to be strong for the children. They’re the ones who are really, really upset, they need me to keep it together here. But she began to feel horrible, big, wrenching sobs bursting out of her lungs. She couldn’t do anything to stop them.

  Roddy was not away on location as she so often tried to fool herself. He was gone. Taken away for ever. He wasn’t ever, ever going to come back to them. Her mobile was never again going to flash with his number, he was never going to be in the doorway back from a trip laden down with presents for them all and she was never, ever going to wake up in the morning and find the nightmare over and him safely back home beside her.

  Standing here on the hillside at the very place for the first time, it broke over her and it hurt so much, so intensely she didn’t know if she could stand the pain, she was struggling for breath, struggling to stand.

  Lana and Owen’s father, her lovely husband, Roddy, had been fatally injured on this walk. Right here on Even Ridge.

  A ‘freak fall’, apparently, so everyone involved in the accident had told her at the time.

  ‘Accidental death’ was the coroner’s final verdict.

  As if the words ‘freak fall . . . could have happened to anyone’ had made it any easier to bear. In fact, she often thought it made it much harder.

  If Roddy had set off that weekend to scale an Alpine glacier, she might have been more prepared for a terrible accident. But he’d left with three of his mates for a beer-drinking and hill-walking weekend: ‘It’ll be much more about beers than hills, I can tell you that,’ he’d joked as he’d flung his overnight bag into the boot of Connor’s car.

  After a big night out, a little bit hungover, Roddy and his friends had set off for a pick-me-up jaunt up to the top of Even Ridge.

  Close to the summit, Roddy had stumbled, lost his footing and fallen. He’d rolled down this steep bit of hill and should have come to a laughing standstill just a few metres further down. His misfortune had been to hit his head hard enough against this boulder right here to cause a massive brain haemorrhage.

  A helicopter had been scrambled and he’d been airlifted to the nearest intensive care unit, but he’d never regained consciousness and after a week on life support, he’d died.

  Annie could wish and wish all she like
d that he’d died immediately. But the reality of Roddy’s death had been a battery of extensive tests and then the devastating news that he was brain dead. His family and his closest friends had all come to visit. They had talked to him and held him and told him things they wished they’d told him so much more often when he could still have heard. They’d cried over him, touched him, kissed him, curled up in bed beside him.

  Until finally Annie, fully conscious, vaguely wondering why she was not entitled to pain relief – an anaesthetic, or at the very least gas and air – had signed the forms.

  With Lana and Owen in the fiercest embrace of Fern next door, with her own arms too tight around the waist of Roddy’s mother, Penny, Annie had watched the nurses quietly and sensitively switch off the machines, take out the tubes, unhook the drips and remove the needles.

  With his wife holding one hand, his mother clinging to the other, it had taken Roddy several excruciatingly long minutes to die. The moment she knew it had happened, Annie had felt a dreadful, physical snap. Something inside her had broken irreparably.

  She had sat with him, gripping his hand, for almost two hours afterwards, so lost and so shocked, she hadn’t even noticed Penny leave the room.

  Until someone, specially trained, had come in to talk her through what happened next.

  What happened next, it turned out, was on a par with a big family wedding except she had just a week to get it organized.

  There were hundreds of phone calls to make, flowers, church, selection books, catalogues, relatives – both liked and disliked – to deal with. There were daily arrivals of more flowers, more cards, and still more phone calls to make and the endlessly ringing phone to answer, like a permanent ringing in her ears.

  After all that, after all the noise and the bustle and the deadlines and the plans and preparations and the great rush and swell of emotion on the day . . . after that came the most deafening silence.

  Annie’s days and evenings became totally silent. She undressed in silence, she went to bed in silence, she woke up to silence. Whole weekends passed in silence. She could talk to her children, she could hear her children, she could put on the television, the radio, play music loudly, she could phone her mother, visit her sister. It didn’t make any difference. All she could hear, for months on end, was the silence in her life where before there had been Roddy.

  Now that she was here on the hillside, now that she could see the slope she and their children had just scrambled down had killed Roddy, she realized how furious she was.

  How outraged, how totally, totally livid she was about this.

  How dare this stupid, innocuous bit of ground, this hard grey useless stone, how dare it take Roddy away from them?

  She kicked furiously against the stone.

  ‘HOW DARE IT? HOW DARE IT?!!’

  Annie realized she was saying it aloud, over and over again. She was squeezing Lana and Owen too tightly, could feel them both pushing slightly against her.

  She let go of them and sat down heavily on the ground, hearing the weird scrunch of the waterproofs underneath her. She cried and cried. Didn’t care now that Lana and Owen had stopped crying, didn’t care whether anyone on the path up there was looking down at them or what Ed, the outsider, was making of it all.

  She howled. She keened.

  She wiped at her streaming nose uselessly with the sleeve of the cagoule. Now there was a shiny patch of snot on her waterproof sleeve, but she didn’t care.

  She didn’t care about anything: not the school fees, not the flat, not Gray, not what was in fashion, or out, or who looked good in what. She cared about nothing but these two dear, dear people standing looking distraught in front of her and the fact that this stupid, bloody useless, heartless, mindless lump of grey stone had taken away their dad. The man who had loved them most in the whole world.

  ‘I don’t care . . . I don’t care . . . I just don’t care . . .’ She realized she was repeating a new phrase over and over in between gulps and choking, snot-laden sobs.

  Then there was an arm round her shoulders. Not Lana’s soft comforting one, or Owen’s light arm which just made it from one of her shoulders to the other and no more. No, this was a heavy arm, holding her tight.

  With her eyes shut, she briefly leaned her head on the shoulder the arm was attached to and felt supported enough to cry more. Cry hard, really hard, cry with some intention of crying herself out.

  Because she was going to have to cry about something else now too: how much she missed her job.

  All day long, she caught herself thinking about little things happening at The Store. About unpeeling the cellophane from the new season’s arrivals, about the excitement of the first day of the bright pink 50 per cent off tickets. Walking past racks of new shoes, inhaling the smell of unbroken leather.

  The flow of women in through her suite every day, the transformations in front of the mirror . . . even tidying up at the end of the day, seeing the place in the dimness of the night half-lights. She missed it all so much.

  She liked the fact that this solid arm and shoulder didn’t come with words. It didn’t say: ‘There, there’, or, ‘It’s going to be OK’, or ‘Don’t cry’, or ‘Shhhhh now.’ It was just there. Holding her shoulders tightly. Giving her heavy head a place to rest.

  Long enough to catch her breath again, to grope for the sides in this pool of grief and begin to pull herself up, out of the water for a little bit.

  Eyes closed, head still leaning, she waited for the heavy breaths and gulps, the rasping feeling in her lungs to die down.

  After a long time, she felt able to open her swollen eyes again. Slowly, she released herself from the grip of the arm and she stood up.

  When she could manage the words, she said, ‘I’m really sorry,’ to Ed, the owner of the arm.

  ‘No need to be, I understand,’ he said gently.

  ‘Where are the children?’ she asked, surprised to see they were no longer around.

  ‘They’ve gone on to the top of the hill. Do you feel ready to walk up after them?’

  When she nodded in reply to this, but looked anxiously at the steep slope they’d have to scramble up to get back onto the path, Ed held out his hand and told her: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll help you.’

  She took hold of the hand offered and let him pull her up the steep slope. On the summit of the hill, she could see Lana and Owen standing close together, pointing out the things they could see in the distance.

  When Annie finally got up beside them, she looked out over the wide open view, ruffled Owen’s overgrown hair, and asked him, ‘What do you think of this?’

  Eyes fixed on the distance, he slipped his hand into hers, and told her, ‘Thanks, Mum. I always wanted to finish Daddy’s walk for him.’

  When Lana heard this, she told her brother in a voice close to a whisper, ‘That’s really nice, Owen. I never thought of it like that . . . I’m glad you brought us here.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Spare clothes Annie:

  Wide, short, worn-out jeans (Ed)

  Belt (hers)

  Tennis socks (Ed)

  White boxers (Ed)

  Navy blue sweatshirt (Ed)

  Est. cost: £0

  ‘I’m bloody soaked!’

  ‘Are you OK?’ Ed had asked Annie with concern as she’d scrambled to her feet after a backwards-on-her-bottom skid down a substantial chunk of hill in the torrential rain which had accompanied them all the way down.

  The smooth waterproof trousers had tobogganed her furiously over several fierce dips, bumps and tufts until, pained and winded, she’d skidded to a standstill. The force of the slide had split the trousers in two and caused her anorak to ride up, wetting all her clothes underneath.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she’d told the little crowd of three around her, ‘but I’m drenched!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ed had assured her. ‘I’ve got some spare things in my tent.’

  She’d worried about that all the way down the rest of th
e hill.

  Back at the camp-site, Ed’s tent had collapsed under the weight of the downpour. A handful of boys and their dads were taking down one of the big tents before it did the same.

  ‘I think we might call it a day,’ one of the dads called out to Ed as they walked past. ‘Forecast is for heavy rain.’

  Nevertheless, Ed managed to fish out his holdall from the jumble of tent fabric, sleeping bags and assorted belongings and told Annie to take whatever she needed.

  In the dank toilet and shower block, she undid the zip on the ancient sports bag and looked inside.

  Chaos.

  She felt in gingerly, but at least it seemed to be a clean sort of chaos. The dirty pants and socks she’d feared must have been tucked away somewhere else. She pulled out a pair of faded jeans, which were going to be too wide and too short, but there was nothing else in the trouser department. A white T-shirt, wafting washing powder, although it was saggy and almost threadbare, and a worn-out, frayed-at-the-edges sweatshirt were the items she decided would have to do for her top half. She’d need those socks and boxers, too. Should she risk wearing his boxers? They looked clean.

  She scrambled out of her wet clothes and into the dry ones as quickly as she could, trying not to look at the cold room around her, walls damp to the touch with a persistent dripping sound. She used her belt to hitch up the trousers, making the denim bunch and gape.

  Then her phone, tucked into the wet trousers she’d just peeled off, began to ring.

  Her mother opened with the question: ‘Where are you, Annie?’

  ‘I’m with Owen and Lana and their music teacher . . .’ she began. ‘Owen was at this camp-site and it’s right beside the hill where Roddy fell.’ She talked Fern through the journey they’d just made.

  ‘Oh my God!’ was Fern’s reaction. ‘Are you OK?’