The Girl in the Red Coat

20

I know now I died the night of the feast. The knowing comes to me, quick, like a light being turned on. I stagger into the kitchen and fall into a chair and bang the table with the flats of my hands.

‘No, no, no. I don’t want to be a ghost. Save me. Save me.’

Dorothy stands in front of me with both hands up to her face. ‘What in the world is the matter, child?’

‘You mean you can really see me right now?’ I howl. ‘I’m not dead?’

‘Of course not — oh, sweet Jesus, and Dennis out too. What’s happened?’ She sits next to me and puts her arms round me tight.

After a long time I stop crying and sit up.

‘I found some old photos with children and I realised they must all be dead by now and I just started thinking it.’ It sounds silly to say that now.

She sighs. ‘You’ve been alone too much, that’s the trouble.’

‘Dorothy, how long do I have to be here? I probably should be back in school now.’ Days are like beads and I’ve lost count of how many there’s been but I think by now there’s been necklaces and necklaces of them. Lots of nights too, each one sneaking out onto the landing.

My question makes her give a little jump and the thought comes to me that maybe something terrible has happened to Mum and they haven’t told me yet.

‘Why, do you not like us, child?’ Her eyes peep at me from the corners. ‘Perhaps we should think of something nice to do. Take your mind off things.’

‘I want to talk to my dad. Grandad has the number.’ I didn’t see him for so long I don’t know if I can remember it myself.

‘Mmm. I guess.’

‘Why can’t I?’ I feel like banging my hands again.

‘Now then, this will upset your grandfather,’ she mutters. She’s looking at me like she’s scared of what I’ll do next.

‘I want. To talk. To Dad.’ Crying has made me hiccup when I talk.

She pinches her forehead between her fingers. ‘Ah, I remember now. I do have the number — in case of emergencies.’

‘You do? Can you ring it, please? Ring it now.’

She takes a phone out of her bag and presses the numbers and hands me the phone and I’m trembling at the thought of speaking to Dad. Dorothy carries on putting saucepans away but she keeps looking over at me. It rings about two hundred times.

‘Carmel. You’ve been doing that for twenty minutes. This is what’s been happening. We didn’t want to tell you — but he hasn’t answered for days.’ I shoot out my arm to throw the phone down but at the last minute I pretend to just drop it instead. It spins on the table and stops ringing.

Dorothy says, ‘Carmel, that’s naughty.’ But I’m collapsing on the chair and burying my head in my arms because Dad being like I’m not even alive is making me feel like a ghost again.

‘What if we go outside?’ says Dorothy quickly.

I lift up my head. ‘Outside the wall?’

*

When we get to the gate Dorothy puts her hand down the front of her blue blouse and feels about. Then she pulls out a long piece of blue cord and on the end of it is a silver key. So that’s where they keep it, I think, right next to them.

‘No telling about our little adventure to your grandfather now. It’ll be our secret. He’s overprotective, he thinks it’s not safe round here. Do you know what overprotective means?’

I nod, and this being a secret makes me think something I’ve thought before — that Dorothy’s a little bit afraid of Grandad, that she does what he tells her to do on the outside, but on the inside her thoughts are different. I can see them sometimes, in her amber eyes, flittering away with tiny brown butterflies. Then she rolls down her eyelids and blinks to make them go away.

She gives a push with her fingers and the metal gates swing forward.

‘Oh,’ I breathe. Then ‘Oh’ again because it’s a kind of funny shock for me to see the outside and I feel dizzy as if I might fly off into the air. But the strangest thing of all is, for a flash, what I really want to do is to creep back inside the gate again and for it to be closed and locked behind us.

Dorothy is already stomping out, carrying the orange plastic Sainsbury’s bag with a picnic in it.

She turns. ‘What’s troubling you now, Carmel?’

‘Everything looks so big.’ It’s not flat as a pancake like where I live but as though waves have rolled along under the earth and pushed up, making hills as far as you can see.

‘Do you want to go back in?’

I say, ‘No,’ quickly and step outside the gates onto the grass.

‘We’ll walk right round the wall,’ Dorothy says. Her black skirt flicks up into the air as she walks. We start following the path. Soon we’re so high the forest and the silver river below look as small as a farm set. I put my hands on the wall for balance and the stone feels hot from the sun and the wind whips into my face and I want to shout out:

‘I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.’

*

After Grandad gets back, I wonder if he can guess we’ve been outside. If something gives us away — the fresh air clinging to our clothes, perhaps, or the look in our eyes. He’s more serious even than he usually is. He’s still got his limp, but now it’s just a nuisance to him — something he has to drag around like a bike or a heavy bag. His thoughts are big and heavy too, I can tell. His forehead gets tight like a garlic bulb with a little blue vein raised up on it.

He tells Dorothy to ‘prepare’. I want to ask, ‘For what?’ But there’s something about Grandad that stops you asking things these days. The way his big owl eyes look at you as though you’ve done something wrong. Something bad, snooping and spying again. Being untrustworthy.

Me and Dorothy tidy up the kitchen and he keeps making calls on his mobile phone, always going out of the apartment or into another room. Dorothy’s quiet and peeps over her shoulder at the door. Sometimes she gives me the tea towel or the broom and says, ‘You stay here and carry on.’ When they’re both gone I try my trick of stretching out my ears. It doesn’t work this time and all I can hear are mashed-together words that sound like a washing machine going round.

I start drying the dishes slowly, keeping as quiet as I can, so the sounds coming from me won’t cover their conversation. But I still can’t hear. I feel prickly all over, even in between my toes and inside my bottom. I think I’m scared of Grandad now with his pale eyes and his garlic-bulb head and the way he has of watching me. And he gets worked up really easily, and when that happens you’ll do anything you can to make things better and get him calm again, to make him sit nice and quiet and crack away at his favourite peanuts. But I realise all of a sudden listening won’t make that happen, because of being untrustworthy again.

Now there’s feet shuffling towards the door and they both stand looking at me.

‘Carmel, child. Put the dishes down and come sit down.’ Dorothy says it kindly but for some reason this makes the prickles worse, so they’re running down my back in rivers.

I do as I’m told and Dorothy tidies the colouring things they’ve given me into a pile. Grandad sits at the head of the table in one of his black suits. Dorothy’s in her soft red blouse, the one she was wearing the night I came here. Both of their mouths are turning down at the corners. Grandad keeps fidgeting on his hard wooden chair and I can see his sparkly energy is back and it’s flying round the room and that’s what’s making him fidget so much.

‘Carmel. Dear, dear Carmel.’ Grandad wipes his hanky over his face and I’m getting scareder and scareder.

‘What? What is it?’ My voice rushes out of me like a little wind.

‘I’m afraid I only have bad news today, Carmel. Bad, terrible news,’ says Grandad, and my throat squeezes tight like he has his hands round it and he’s choking me half to death.

‘Mum?’ I whisper.

Grandad nods. I turn to Dorothy but she’s looking away.

‘I’m afraid so, Carmel. I’m afraid I’ve heard — and there’s no easy way to say this — that your mother died in the night.’

And even though I knew this was what they were going to say I jump up and scream, ‘No.’

‘Carmel, dear. You have to be calm. Listen …’

I won’t listen. My hands push at the table and I don’t know how — it’s so huge and heavy — but the legs screech across the floor and it smashes right into Dorothy’s ribs.

‘No, no, no.’

What can I do? I don’t know where to put myself, even. I run out of their apartment. Grandad shouts out, ‘No, child, listen,’ but I can’t stop — up and down the stairs. Bashing myself into the walls on purpose. Hitting my head with my own hands.

‘It can’t be true. It can’t be,’ I’m yelling down the big stairs. ‘I want to see her right now.’

Dorothy’s face is a floating blob below. ‘Please, child. It’s a terrible cross to bear but you must face it. We must face it together.’ She starts walking up the stairs with one hand out in front of her like I’m a squirrel she wants to feed.

And Dorothy saying it makes it really true. With Grandad you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next — blood of lambs, taking the B road — but Dorothy’s realer, like a mother or a teacher. When she says it, that’s it. I rush past her and she falls back against the wall, her eyes and mouth three round Os. Behind me I can hear their shouts and Grandad saying, ‘After her, Dorothy. After her.’ There’s Grandad’s slide, drag of his bad leg and then the thud of his good one. Dorothy’s quicker. I hear her patter and I imagine her bunching her long skirt up in her hands so she can run better.

But they’re no match for me. My terrible hurting pain’s like petrol so I’m a burning car tearing through the building, wailing as I go. Back up the stairs and past my bedroom, past rows of windows and a broken one where I’ve seen fast birds fly in and out of the hole — to a part I haven’t been before, a staircase with carved handles. At the top is a big brown door and it gives way with a whoosh like the sound of a fridge opening.

And I fall inside a room I just know has had no human being inside it for about a hundred years. There’s velvet-covered chairs bunched around the fireplace and when I fall in shrieking I feel them turn towards me, like real sitting people would do if someone came in wailing their head off. The thick red carpet swallows up the noise of my footsteps.

This room is the pain room, I think. This is the room of death. There’s black wallpaper covering the walls and in it I can see evil buds of pink flowers patterned over and over again — a thousand flesh eyes all looking.

‘My mother’s dead,’ I gasp at the room.

It freezes at first and doesn’t know what to say back.

‘She’s dead, she’s dead.’

I run in circles, pushing over wooden tables with pots of plants that died years ago and they crash to the floor and empty ashy stuff across the carpet. And after not knowing what to say, the room wakes up with a roar from being dead and frozen. It goes after me, chasing behind as I kick chairs and rip at old dirty velvet on the cushions with my teeth. I scrabble at the wallpaper with my nails but it’s so thick and glued on my fingernails slide across it.

‘You’re just furniture,’ I yell and start shredding and kicking again because I want to turn it into lumps. I’m knocking myself against heavy things and crying out for Mum: ‘Mum, Mum, Mum — don’t leave me here, don’t leave me here.’

The room’s half destroyed when I hear Dorothy and Grandad’s shouts. I’ve shredded it in five minutes flat after it staying the same — like a tail or an eye in a jar — for a hundred years, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to put every single wall eye out. There’s a mirror above the fireplace and I catch myself in it — panting and spitty — and I look so white and strange, with glittering eyes, I hardly know it’s me for a second.

As I fly out of the door Dorothy is lifting up her skirt and putting one foot, in her old-fashioned black lace-up shoe, on the bottom stair but I’m down and past her and she tries to grab me but misses. She looks up, with her mouth falling open, like I’m just a blurry ball of hair and teeth and skirts screaming by, then gone.

Outside I’m halfway through the garden when the electricity that’s been making me run lifts out of my body and I fall, panting and tired out, until I manage to lift up my head and see I’m outside the hobbit houses. A big plop of rain falls — and I’m so close it looks huge — and I watch it land on a leaf, wobble and shine, then drip down. I crawl to the hobbit house at the end. There’s a bench on the back wall but I curl up on the floor on the lumps of stone there and push the door closed with my feet. A spider twinkles over to me, stops for a second, then dances into my hair and I don’t even shake it out.

Slowly, the light goes greyer. There’s a patter of rain outside and puffs of fresh air that smell of green weeds come through the holes. ‘Mum,’ I gulp — and think I sound like a fish.

There’s a feeling I’ve got, an idea that won’t go away: that if I’d never found that flower death bud room, none of this would have happened. It doesn’t make sense because they told me about Mum before I’d even set foot inside but the feeling of that place is clinging to me like a gas that’s crept inside the holes in my skin. I tremble and cry for my old life: walks, Christmas, garden, you’re a right nutter, Mum’s friends drinking wine round the kitchen table, the kettle going on in the morning and Mrs Buckfast at the front of the class. Most of all though — the kind blue lights in Mum’s eyes.

I hear a tramping and one real amber eye appears and hangs outside, looking through a hole in the door like the moon.

‘Child, where have you been? We’ve been so anxious, so worried. What are you doing there, covered in dirt? You’ve been gone so long, we thought you’d vanished into thin air.’

I look at the talking eye but I’m just a frozen lump.

‘Dear, dear.’ I can hear Dorothy shuffling around, pushing against the door and panting, but I’m behind it so it won’t open.

The eye pops up again. ‘Child, you will have to move. I can’t budge the door. Oh my, this is very bad, a bad business.’

More heaving till she’s pushing so hard I’m being shoved like a stuffed snake that gets put on the backs of doors to stop the draught. Arms come round the door and a hand grabs my shoulder and I get shovelled out from my hidey-hole.

‘There, there.’ A sudden whoosh into the light and I’m lifted up into Dorothy’s arms — my head rolling backwards and my feet bumping up and down as she carries me.

‘There, there, child. Oh, what good can come of this? Really, really. Fool,’ Dorothy mutters as she heaves me up higher and struggles to balance herself on her two thin legs.

I get wrapped in a blanket that night, and put to bed. In a camp bed this time, at the bottom of theirs. So they can keep a watch on me.

*

Then I’m on their bed, wrapped in a sheet this time. It’s morning. Bright daylight comes through the window falling on suitcases with coloured tickets tied to the handles. I move my head and it hurts. I blink and it hurts. I pinch my lips together and they hurt.

I don’t hear them come in.

Grandad smiles down at me. ‘How are we feeling? Are we feeling better?’

I shake my head. ‘Dad,’ I mumble.

He sits on the bed beside me. His face is very sorry and concerned.

‘We’ve been in contact with your father. He’s cast down to the depths about what’s happened, Carmel. But you know, you know you told us he lives with another lady now, a lady that’s not your mum? You know you told us you don’t see him a whole lot …’

Clothes, floating out of the window, with no body to them and coming to rest on the ground, where I can’t see. Dad’s sneery voice, out of sight: ‘You think you’re so middle class, but now you can shove it up your arse. Stone me, that sort of rhymes.’ Then his laugh. Not like his, but someone I don’t know — a demon.

‘Well, he thinks it best … he thinks we should, I’m sorry …’ But I know already. Getting excited about Dad going to the hospital was babyish — silly and horrible because he still loves Lucy. Mum tried to make me feel better when we didn’t see him for weeks and weeks on end but all the time I knew, I knew what was happening. Clothes don’t fall out of windows for nothing.

Dorothy is wearing the yellow blouse with pink roses, scared thoughts beating behind her eyes — what will come of this? Grandad doesn’t know about these thoughts she has.

‘Dorothy?’ I ask. ‘Dorothy, can I come and live with you?’

There’s a hiss of escaping air, the sound of joy? From Dorothy? No, it’s Grandad.

‘Why yes, dear, yes … Oh, gladly, gladly …’ From him.

But it’s to Dorothy I turn. She leans over me and catches me in a hug against her bony chest. I hold onto her, tight, and get covered by bright pink roses.

Then later, in the kitchen. I’m dressed and Dorothy’s trying to get me to eat something. I turn my head away from the egg — ‘sunny side up’ — feeling sick to my stomach. She shrugs and leaves me to it. I want her not to turn away and to cuddle me again but she’s busy, scooping things out of cupboards and throwing them in a black plastic bin bag. ‘The trash can’, she calls it.

This is before the tablets. Before: ‘This’ll help you to relax, Carmel. Just swallow them down, honey. Take them with a little water …’ Before all that … the heavy drop down into the land of dreams. To the bottom of the sea where hardly a thing moves.

She’s gone off somewhere and I’m left sitting at the kitchen table, the plate of egg sticky and gross in front of me, getting cold. I notice a bright spot on the grey tiles on the floor. A purple stripe against a red one. I get up to look. Closer, I see it’s my T-shirt. It’s been wet and now it’s dried into a hard dirty ball. Dorothy’s been cleaning the floor with it. It’s like a thing from ages ago. Something you see in a museum in a case with a label up against the glass — ‘Carmel used to wear this.’

Once, near a place called Stonehenge, we went for a walk. There was a hill Mum called a ‘burial mound’. At the bottom of the hill was a tree, and the tree had tied to its branches a hundred waving scraps of cloth and ribbons and bits of paper with writing on, some in plastic things to keep them safe from the rain. I tried to read some but the rain had got in anyway and made the ink dribble down the page. ‘Wishes,’ my mum said, ‘that people have left here, even the ones that are a scrap of ribbon. It represents a wish.’

I get some scissors from the drawer and snip, snip I have a piece of purple-and-red stripes.

I hurry, before anyone can stop me, to the wall tree and climb right in among the branches and tie the strip up high, wrapping it round twice, three times with a double knot for safety. And I make my wish, even though I know it’s impossible — impossible for this not to have happened and for Mum to be alive again. I make it anyway because not even Grandad can stop you wishing. It hangs down limp for a moment then a little breeze makes it stand out sideways like a dirty flag.

I climb down from the tree. By the door there’s a spade stuck into the ground. Grandad’s black coat is hanging on it. I can tell from the heaviness there’s something in the pocket. And I know it’s untrustworthy, but I reach my hand in and it’s a phone. Dad, I think. Maybe he’s changed his mind. Maybe if I speak to him he’ll come and get me in his red car. I pick up the phone and stare at the numbers. Someone seems to have taken out my brain and put something else there, slow and stupid. I stare at the phone and try to concentrate. I knew the number before, ages ago. I did. I did. Remember, I tell myself, remember. Then — 0 7 8 1. I frown — what comes after 1? It’s curled up — 6.

I look up. Grandad’s standing at the door and he’s got his arms folded and I get shivers all over because I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t. My hand goes tight on the phone and I press the buttons without meaning to so lots of little beeps come out.

He doesn’t get cross like I’m expecting. He goes down on the ground, bending so he’s on one knee and that hurts him.

‘Carmel. Honey, child. What are you doing?’ His voice is soft and kind.

I hold tight onto the phone.

‘Carmel?’

‘Dad …’ It’s a squeak that’s come out.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about your dad, honey. Maybe he’ll reconsider one day but he says — and I know how hard this is — he says he must start a new life now. As must we.’

Then he takes my hand and curls my fingers back and takes the phone away.