The Watcher Read Free

Her pension was modest. She could not make big changes. Nor was it clear that she would be less lonely elsewhere. Perhaps it was down to the building. Or perhaps it was down to her.
    Thinking that she could no longer bear the silence, she reached for her telephone and hurriedly dialled her daughter’s number. She did it before fear or shyness could get the better of her. She had always had a good relationship with her daughter, but since Keira had got married and had a baby, the contact had started to crumble a little. Young people did not have time. They were so occupied with themselves and their lives.
    Where to find the energy to look after a mother whose life had gone down the pan?
    Carla could sometimes scarcely believe it herself: divorced after twenty-eight years of marriage. Her husband had been in debt up to his eyeballs. He had lived beyond his means and over the years the debts had grown and grown. He had skedaddled before his creditors could catch up with him. For years there had been no trace of him. Carla still suffered from the experience. She was often whiny. Keira had escaped the mess into which her father’s bankruptcy had plunged the family by finding her own comfortable life in Bracknell, forty-five minutes south-west of the centre of London. After finishing her maths degree, she had found a good job in a bank and married a man with a safe job in the bank’s management. Carla knew she should be happy for her daughter.
    Keira answered the phone on the second ring. She sounded stressed. Her little boy was screaming in the background.
    ‘Hi, Keira. Mummy here. I just wanted to see how you were.’
    ‘Oh, hi, Mum,’ said Keira. She did not sound enthusiastic. ‘Yes, everything’s OK. Johnny’s just not sleeping well. He’s always screaming at night. I’m pretty shattered.’
    ‘He must be getting his teeth through.’
    ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Keira went silent for a moment, then asked, duty-bound, ‘And how are you?’
    For a second Carla was tempted to just tell the truth: that she felt rotten, that she felt completely alone. But she knew that her daughter did not want to hear that, because everything was too much for her too right then. She would have reacted badly.
    ‘Oh, well, I am on my own rather often,’ she said. ‘Since I retired . . .’ She left the rest of the sentence unsaid. Things could not be helped.
    Keira sighed. ‘You have to find some leisure activity you enjoy. A hobby where you meet like-minded people. Whether it’s a cookery course or a sport that you start doing, you need to be round people.’
    ‘Hmm, jumping around with old ladies in aerobics classes for the elderly . . .’
    Keira sighed again, this time with obvious impatience. ‘It doesn’t need to be that. God, there’s oodles of options. You’ll be able to find something that matches even your expectations!’
    Carla was tempted to let her daughter in on the secret that she had been going to a self-help group for single women, but that she had not managed to make lasting friends. Probably she had been moaning too much. Nobody could bear her for long. No, it was better not to let Keira know about that project.
    ‘I think everything just depresses me,’ she said. ‘If I go swimming or cook during the day, it just makes me realise that I’m not a fully active member of society any more. That I’m not working and have no family to care for. And when I come home again, then of course no one is waiting for me.’
    ‘But you would certainly meet some nice women who you could do things with now and then.’
    ‘Most of them probably have families and wouldn’t have time for me.’
    ‘Right, because you’re the only divorced pensioner in all of England,’ replied Keira sharply. ‘Do you want to sit in front of your television in your flat every night for the rest of your life under a cloud of despair?’
    ‘And get on my daughter’s nerves?’
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘This block is oppressive,’