The Girl in the Red Coat

1

I dream about Carmel often. In my dreams she’s always walking backwards.

The day she was born there was snow on the ground. A silvery light arced through the window as I held her in my arms.

As she grew up I nicknamed her ‘my little hedge child’. I couldn’t imagine her living anywhere but the countryside. Her thick curly hair stood out like a spray of breaking glass, or a dandelion head.

‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards,’ I’d say to her.

And she would smile. Her eyes would close and flutter. The pale purple-veined lids like butterflies sealing each eye.

‘I can imagine that,’ she’d say finally, licking her lips.

I’m looking out of the window and I can almost see her — in those tights that made cherry liquorice of her legs — walking up the lane to school. The missing her feels like my throat has been removed.

Tonight I’ll dream of her again, I can feel it. I can feel her in the twilight, sitting up on the skeined branches of the beech tree and calling out. But at night in my sleep she’ll be walking backwards towards the house — or is it away? — so she never gets closer.

Her clothes were often an untidy riot. The crotch of her winter tights bowed down between her knees so she’d walk like a penguin. Her school collar would stick up on one side and be buried in her jumper on the other. But her mind was a different matter — she knew what people were feeling. When Sally’s husband left her, Sally sat in my kitchen drinking tequila as I tried to console her. Salt and lime and liquor for a husband. Carmel came past and made her fingers into little sticks that she stuck into Sally’s thick brown hair and massaged her scalp. Sally moaned and dropped her head backwards.

‘Oh my God, Carmel, where did you learn to do that?’

‘Hush, nowhere,’ she whispered, kneading away.

That was just before she disappeared into the fog.

*

Christmas 1999. The children’s cheeks blotched pink with cold and excitement as they hurried through the school gates. To me, they all looked like little trolls compared to Carmel. I wondered then if every parent had such thoughts. We had to walk home through the country lanes and already it was nearly dark.

It was cold as we started off and snow edged the road. It glowed in the twilight and marked our way. I realised I was balling my hands in tight fists inside my pockets with worries about Christmas and no money. As I drew my hands out into the cold air and uncurled them Carmel fell back and I could hear her grumbling behind me.

‘Do hurry up,’ I said, anxious to get home out of the freezing night.

‘You realise, Mum, that I won’t always be with you,’ she said, her voice small and breathy in the fading light.

Maybe my heart should have frozen then. Maybe I should have turned and gathered her up and taken her home. Kept her shut away in a fortress or a tower. Locked with a golden key that I would swallow, so my stomach would have to be cut open before she could be found. But of course I thought it meant nothing, nothing at all.

‘Well, you’re with me for now.’

I turned. She seemed far behind me. The shape of her head was the same as the tussocky tops of the hedges that closed in on either side.

‘Carmel?’

A long plume of delicate ice breath brushed past my coat sleeve.

‘I’m here.’

*

Sometimes I wonder if when I’m dead I’m destined to be looking still. Turned into an owl and flying over the fields at night, swooping over crouching hedges and dark lanes. The smoke from chimneys billowing and swaying from the movement of my wings as I pass through. Or will I sit with her, high up in the beech tree, playing games? Spying on the people who live in our house and watching their comings and goings. Maybe we’ll call out to them and make them jump.

We were single mothers, almost to a man — as one of the group once joked. We clustered together in solidarity of our status. I think now maybe it was not good for Carmel, this band of women with bitter fire glinting from their eyes and rings. Many evenings we’d be round the kitchen table and it would be then he, then he, then he. We were all hurt in some way, bruised inside. Except for Alice who had real bruises. After Carmel had gone — oh, a few months or so — Alice came to the house.

‘I had to speak to you,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you something.’

Still I imagined anything could be a clue to the puzzle.

‘What is it? What is it?’ I asked, frantically clutching at the neck of my dressing gown. What she told me disappointed me so much I turned my face away and looked at the empty shell of the egg I’d eaten yesterday on the kitchen drainer. But when she started to tell me my daughter had a channel to God and could be now at His right hand — how I hated her then. Her false clues and her finding of Jesus, those wrists in identical braided bracelets turning as she spoke. I could stay silent no longer.

‘Stop it!’ I yelled. ‘Get out of here. I thought you had something real to tell me. Get out of this house and leave me alone, you stupid cow. You crazy stupid cow. Take your God with you and don’t ever come back.’

*

Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, I imagine crawling inside the shell of Carmel’s skull and finding her memories there. Peering through her eye sockets and watching the film of her life unfold through her eyes. Look, look: there’s me and her father, when we were together. Carmel’s still small so to her we seem like giants, growing up into the sky. I lean down to pick her up and empty nursery rhymes into her ear.

And there’s that day out to the circus.

We have a picnic by the big top before we go in. I spread out the blanket on the grass, so I don’t notice Carmel turn her head and see the clown peering from between the tent flaps. His face has thick white make-up with a big red mouth shape drawn on. She puzzles why his head is so high up because his stilts are hidden by the striped tent flap. He looks briefly up at the sky to check the weather, then his red-and-white face disappears back inside.

What else? Starting school, me breaking up with Paul and throwing his clothes out of the bedroom window. She must have seen them from where she was in the kitchen — his shirts and trousers sailing down. Other things, how many memories even in a short life: seeing the sea, a day paddling in the river, Christmas, a full moon, snow.

Always I stop at her eighth birthday and can go no further. Her eighth birthday, when we went to the maze.