The Girl in the Red Coat

23

DAY 90

I was alone for the first time.

Mum and Dad had finally decided they needed to return home to London and I’d urged them to go. Reconnecting with Paul was always going to be harder while they were around — I needed to convince him I was no longer the vengeful ex-wife, I needed somehow to enlist his support.

I’ll stay in the garden, I thought, for as long as I can. Somehow it felt better to be without ceilings, without paintings and furnishings and familiar patterns on mugs and throws and cushions.

The garden in contrast felt new. Unseen, it had transformed itself into summer — the flowers had sprung up without any tending and reds and oranges splashed against the wall. Bees bounced from petal to stamen, disappearing inside as if gulped at by the blooms.

I liberated the tools where they waited patiently for me in the shed and plunged my trowel into the collars of weeds around the flowers. I worked, moving down the long bed, until I looked up to see a section of the wall that had tumbled down, leaving rocks like unexploded devices half buried in the soil. I stopped to wipe the sweat from my face then lifted up the smallest rock and weighed it in my hands, looking for its cleft in the wall. There it was — the exact shape of the stone in my hands. I slotted it into place and looked for another match. I worked methodically, slowly, until the tumbled gash was repaired. The final stone was bigger, flatter than the others, designed to hold the rest in place. I dusted off my hands and stood to look at the perfect puzzle I’d put back together.

Something itched at my consciousness. What? Then it dawned on me that at some point any thoughts of Carmel had left me. That for a while my being was so connected with my task that’s all there was in the world: me and the stones, their undersides cool and damp from the earth and their tops warmed by the sun. How long had this lasted? Two minutes, five — ten? A wave of guilt at forgetting hit me and I knelt on the grass and sank back onto my heels. It seemed impossible, but possible — that there might be a time ahead where I could drink a coffee, get immersed in a book, laugh with a friend, exclaim over a pair of new shoes, choose a paint colour, brush my hand over a velvet curtain and take pleasure in the sensation.

By now the sun was slipping downwards and dusk was dusting the air and I had no choice but to turn to face the darkening house.

Inside, it seemed impossibly quiet and still like time had been pinched out, its golden hands buckled. Now I was alone I felt adrift in it, like it was an abandoned, half-sunk ship full of discarded possessions.

I padded upstairs and sat on her bed. Next to it was one of her most prized things — a china bedside lamp in the shape of a spotted toadstool, the front hollow to reveal the scene inside: a family of china badgers in their cosy kitchen. We’d found it in a charity shop and borne it home, then — clever Mum, I’d thought at the time, clever independent resourceful single mum, who needs him? — rewired it.

I flicked the switch. There was Father Badger, in checked slippers, reading a newspaper at the kitchen table, where a loaf cut in half and a tiny yellow triangle of cheese waited. Mum, in flouncy blue apron, holding a frilled pie just taken from the oven. Baby, also at the table, with a spoon in its mouth. A perfect vision of family; no wonder she loved it.

I flicked the switch on and off, each time half expecting another china figurine to have joined them — Carmel, tiny and immobile, standing by the stove on the miniature striped rug. It’s alright, officer, she’s taken off to live with the badgers. She drinks out of tiny cups and warms herself against tongues of painted fire. No alarm. At least she’s where we can keep an eye. She’ll be back; you can’t live on brown painted bread forever.

Underneath the lamp was a piece of paper — one of Carmel’s drawings. I pulled it out to look: a man sitting with a babbling pencil loop of words coming out of his mouth and a long-eared creature at his feet. I lifted the lamp to tuck the picture back and the bulb clinked against the china inside, threatening to shatter.

I left her room, all the breaths she took in there, her thoughts that still bumped around the ceiling. She seemed to flit around me. I wondered for a split second — was she ever real? Have I dreamt up a whole life? I went into the bathroom and pulled the cord so the harsh bulbs above the mirror showed me in a blaze. I pulled up my T-shirt; there, there she was, in the tracks spreading across my belly, marks made as if by small skeleton hands — fine, silvery.

Around the house there was a buzzing, a smell, a sickness. A memory? Carmel throwing up across the table after a day out. Never mind, never mind — mop it up. A broken toy — a duck that wouldn’t stop nodding and making mechanical quacks; Paul tried to mend it, then gave up and took the batteries out, silencing it for ever. Memories grew out of the darkness; their quick growing webs crossing my path so I walked into them unawares and felt their skeins across my face. Carmel looking up at me: ‘Can we still go?’ Expectation in the air. ‘Yes, we can go. We’re catching a train.’

I reached her room again, realising I was almost panting, and I opened the window to gulp fresh air. Moonlight flooded in. The moon’s swollen face looked down, heavy with something — water, blood — its mouth a fissure across the surface that might at any minute open and emit a high thin scream. I grabbed onto the window frame to steady myself. Get a hold of yourself, I thought.

I found the art materials in the bottom of her cupboard, a plastic crate with a slurry of felt pens, brushes. ‘I need a map,’ I announced to the room. ‘I’ll make a diagram of everyone we know and who knows them — there must be a clue hidden in there somewhere.’

I unrolled a ream of paper and stuck great sheets of it to the wall next to her bed. With a red pen I started in the centre of the blank whiteness.

Carmel.

Purple lines for our friends. More and more, a growing mesh of people and connections: Paul, his brothers Sean and Darren. Lucy. My friends — Belinda, Nessa, Julie and the rest in a bird’s nest under her name, runnels of felt pen linking us all together. Alice. The man at the maze. Then her friends — I struggled to remember as many of the names from her class as possible and arranged them in choir rows by the side of her.

‘Where are you?’ I asked the map. ‘Is this the line that will take me to you?’ I traced my fingers over the leads. ‘This one? This one? There must be something.’ All the time staving off the knowledge that it might have nothing to do with these names: a random lone event with no leads. Finally, I leaned back on her bedside table, exhausted, but with the realisation that even in this task I had again been absorbed, briefly, in that zone of forgetting.

My first night alone and I slept soundly, not one single dream penetrating the dark night. In the morning I wandered into her room with my tea in hand and faced the spiralling chart on her wall. The map of my daughter, I thought — it looked like a giant tangled spider ready to grow its many legs and wrap them round the world, its feathery feet feeling for where she was.

As I stood back and examined the coloured lines, the connections that ran between people, I saw also that it was a map of myself, of everyone I’d ever known and who’d known me, and it was a kind of funny shock to be reminded of that. I was a chunk of something split apart. I was going to have to find a way to survive alone — that, or shrivel and die.