Section 2, 5

I don’t think Charlie’s poster will find the cat and I’m not sure mine will either. Charlie and I don’t have a very good record on written communication. It must have been love, because when he read that note fifteen years later he still came to find me.

But I wasn’t there, the lunchtime lectures ended a long time ago. I wasn’t at the storey, I wasn’t anywhere. A few weeks before the builder took the note to Charlie I was out with my husband, my second husband, and it was lovely weather and we decided to have a picnic out on the sands, near Silverdale. It was my fiftieth birthday and we thought it would be romantic, and we sat below Humphrey head on a blanket and we had fizzy wine and we kissed for a long time, and then it went foggy, out of nowhere, and you know the tides around here, and the waves rushed in, rushed towards our love, surrounded us and made us into an island, and that’s how we died; together. I guess it could just as easily have been me and Charlie in another existence.

I used to think about Charlie a lot. Once I saw him on his own walking slowly out of the lino factory, but I didn’t stop.

I thought about Charlie and our night in the Tasting Garden as the water crept up, the coldness numbing us, and we were crying and holding the mobile phone higher and higher and we kept dialing and redialing and looking for the lights, then we saw the smeary blues and whites and heard the shouting, the panic, and they really did seem to be trying, but it was all too rough, too stormy, and I remember thinking how I’d hate to be the rescuers, watching us, so helpless, and I remember thinking I had a new name and that when Charlie read in the papers that I had died, he wouldn’t even know it was me.

Find Zig-zag please.

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

Have a look at Charlie’s blog and see what he did when he found out.