The Girl in the Red Coat

24

I hear voices. Doors are flung open and light comes flooding inside. The two people standing outside are black against the orange sky.

I realise I’ve been in a truck all this time.

One of them leans forward and the bulb of his head gleams in a splash of light and I recognise Grandad. My eyes sharpen up — they’re both there. Dorothy and Grandad.

Oh, I’m so pleased and relieved to see them I nearly cry out. My memories of them come rushing back, but I can’t say a word. I lie there and watch Grandad fold out metal steps from the floor of the van. Dorothy’s standing way behind him.

Grandad opens out his arms wide, welcoming. He looks bigger and more powerful than I remember. His head’s held high and before it was always bent down with his eyes looking upwards from the corners. He’s pleased with himself now — strong and happy — lit pinky-orange from the sky and his white hair is longer and it’s moving about in the breeze and his pale eyes are full of light. His hands are as big as spades and he seems excited to be alive.

I look at Dorothy.

It’s strange. If anyone asked me which one I like best, which one’s more friendly, I’d say Dorothy, she gave me hugs and once took me on a secret picnic, but she’s changed too. I don’t know how you can tell all this just by looking one time, but I do. Straight away. I see her with her face turned backwards from the sun and her eyes like black holes in her head. I know in that second she’s a person who puts herself in shadows.

Behind them, the sun is low down and lighting up a place that’s not even fields — just countryside with huge rocks sticking out of the ground. My brain reaches down inside of me and I feel the great big stone egg there: I know it’s called ‘my mum is dead and everything has changed for ever’.

This looking and knowing happens in a few seconds.

The twins run down the metal steps in great leaps. They run round Dorothy and talk in a different language to her I don’t understand.

I feel I’m not afraid. I don’t even want to cry. I’m an insect that’s been put in a jar and shaken so much it’s lying at the bottom, too battered to fly up. Slowly I climb out of bed and come down the steps — not like the twins, dancing and leaping, but like a little old lady, creeping, creeping along like her legs will break.

Grandad puts one arm around me to help me down. ‘Carmel, how lovely to see you back to yourself and up and about again,’ he says.

I want to say I don’t feel very much like myself and I hardly call this creeping around being up and about.

‘Welcome, welcome to our little family. I see you have already met Dorothy’s girls. Her lovely twins, her flower buds.’

I nod. Why didn’t Dorothy tell me she had twins? Why didn’t she say, ‘I’ve got two girls about the same age as you’? Why didn’t she say, ‘I can speak a different language?’ Dorothy is bending down over a pile of stuff on the ground and the twins are running around her like dogs let out after being shut up for a long time.

I feel a stab through my heart then and the stone egg gets heavier. I’m longing for Dorothy to come up to me and put her arms round me and say everything’s A-OK and be back to how we were before. But she’s opening up boxes and taking out saucepans and tins and the light is glowing on her brown skin and it’s like she’s turning her face away from me on purpose.

I come down the last step and my hand is on Grandad’s sleeve. He’s got on his usual white shirt, but over it there’s a short coat. One like Dad had and used to call a ‘donkey jacket’. It feels thick and felty on my fingers.

It makes Grandad look strong and tough.

‘Hello, dear,’ he says to me in a quiet voice.

‘Hello,’ I say back and it feels like the hellos are private between us, away from Dorothy and the noisy twins.

‘How are you feeling?’ His face is serious, and he’s looking at me as if I’m the most important thing in the world. And the look makes me want to cry because I haven’t seen anything like it for so long. It’s a kind of Mum look. But I won’t let myself cry. I think about how I need to break the hard stone egg inside me into tiny bits — Courage, Carmel, courage — because it’s so heavy I don’t think I can stand to carry it round for very long.

The bigness of outside is making me dizzy. ‘Grandad,’ I ask, ‘do you live inside this truck?’

He smiles and the wind whips his hair into his eyes then out again.

‘For the moment, for the moment. It was provided to us and in it we make our home. But it’s better than a house because it moves around.’

I feel a pain, right down below. ‘Is there … is there a toilet in it?’ I ask, and then I wish I hadn’t because I can see from his face the answer’s no but he doesn’t want to think his truck’s no good.

‘I’m afraid this is no Hymer motor home. This is no fully kitted luxury vehicle. We have no need of that. If we need to relieve ourselves we do it in nature.’

I look around. I think he means for me to wee out on the grass but there’s not a house or even a hedge in sight to hide behind. I step down, and when my foot touches the grass Grandad says to me, ‘Welcome to America.’

And I look up at him amazed. I even forget about needing a wee.

‘We’re in America? Is that really true?’

He smiles, all dreamy. ‘Yes, it’s really true. You’ve been sick, Carmel, for a very long time, but I can see now that you are going to get better. The prayers we’ve said have finally been answered and Carmel is back in the land of the living.’

I shiver when he says that, because if there’s a land of the living there must be a land of the dead — and what it looks like flashes up inside my head. It’s thousands on thousands of eyes all squashed together in a pink meaty lump with every eye blinking and watching separately. Grandad doesn’t notice the shivering.

‘Go behind the truck, dear, and then join us. We’ll light a fire tonight and eat our supper out in the open under God’s great sky.’ He smiles all kind down at me. ‘Go, dear, go.’

I walk to the other end of the truck, the driving bit. My legs hurt and feel weak and strange. I crouch on the stony ground and lift up my nightie and wee. I don’t recognise the nightie. It’s white with pink roses and it comes right down to the ground. Someone else must have put this on me, I think. The wee rolls away from me, steaming and gathering up little bits of dust as it goes. It feels not right, with my bottom bare in this huge wide place, like I could be a little naked rabbit on the ground, ready to be jumped on.

Then I go round to where the others are. Dorothy’s touching the flame of a match to a heap of sticks. I stay round the corner of the truck, peeping for a moment, because I suddenly feel shy. I see Dorothy settle back onto her stool and take out a carton of juice from a bag on the ground. She pours it into four plastic cups and passes them round. The air’s turning bluey-black and the flames from the fire leap up and light their faces. My bare feet feel cold on the stones and scratchy grass and I shiver inside my nightie. Grandad turns round.

‘Whose is that face? Looking out like a new moon? Come and join us, dear.’ His face looks so pleased, and I can feel his feelings, calm and sugary thick, rolling around the campfire. Grandad opens up another camping chair for me to sit on. Then he goes and gets one of the blankets made of crochet from the beds and wraps me up in it.

Dorothy sticks a big fork with three spikes into the cool box next to her. She lifts it up and out and there’s a snake hanging off it, stuck through the neck with the fork.

I scream and jump off my chair. ‘What’s that?’ I’m trembling all over.

They all laugh at me.

‘It’s a sausage, child. Whoever was scared of a sausage?’ She waves the snake about and it turns into a sausage — but a great long one. ‘What did you think it was?’ she asks.

‘A snake.’ And they laugh again. I climb back onto the chair.

‘Don’t worry, dear.’ Grandad gets up and tucks the blanket round me again. ‘You don’t have to fret about anything. Would you like some juice?’ His hands are patting me, making the blanket right. I’m so grateful to him I get a lump in my throat.

‘Yes please.’

‘Let’s cook the snake,’ says Dorothy.

She dangles the sausage above a frying pan on the fire and twists it round and round so it coils up in the pan. Quickly, it starts to sizzle and spit and send out puffs of meaty steam. She smiles at me but the smile’s not right.

When the sausage is cooked she puts bits of it into long bread rolls, the soft kind. She shakes on sauce from a tiny bottle and it spits out, thin and red. I’m hungry. But when she plonks the big meaty chunk on a plastic plate on my lap I’m not any more. I nibble at a corner but something rushes through my mouth, a dragon, and I drop the roll back on my plate.

‘Carmel, we like our food with fire in it. Have you not remembered?’ Dorothy’s face through the heat of the fire has gone wavy.

‘Yes.’ I do, but before it was fun. I’d touched my tongue on things and we’d laughed at the face I’d made. Now the spice seems a bad spell Dorothy’s put on the food. I look at Dorothy and think: please — won’t you offer to make me some mashed potato, or one of the 57 varieties: tomato soup, with crackers on the side. Dorothy, why don’t you like me now? It could just be mashed banana in a cup. I think of vanilla ice cream and my throat burns.

But even through the fire I can see the thoughts in her eyes. The thoughts say — you’re trouble. You spell trouble with a capital T for me and Melody and Silver. Though what this trouble is, I don’t know.

The others eat their rolls. Then Grandad gets out his bag of peanuts and cracks away and soon there’s a pile of empty shells at his feet, the nobbly ends the shape of ladies’ nipples. The twins have been eating and talking with their mouths wide open so I can see their mashed-up food inside. Now their big eyes, the same colour as Dorothy’s, are getting sleepy. They both lean on Dorothy, one on either side. I’m tired too. I feel very tired and weak and tiny in this great huge place.

It’s getting darker and stars burst out of the sky, and they’re so big and hard and glittering, I can hardly believe they’re the same stars that shined down on me at home. They shimmer away and the whole sky feels like it’s moving and whirling above. And there’s just us in the world, sitting around this little fire.

*

I’ve spotted the difference between the twins. It’s something even they don’t know about. But I don’t let on.

Before we got out of bed this morning they were fooling me about who was who. They kept swapping their names. So finding out about the difference is really useful. The secret clue is at the corner of Melody’s mouth. When she talks or smiles or sometimes when she’s not doing anything, the corner of her top lip on one side flicks out, it does a tiny twitch and lifts, so the tooth in the corner goes bare. Then her lip catches on the tooth as she closes the gap. It’s over in a flash and that’s probably why nobody else knows about it. They’re dressed now but I’m in my pink-and-white nightie.

Melody can’t stop staring at me. ‘Mom’s been gone such a long, long time. Was she with you?’

‘Yes.’ It feels like she might be upset I took Dorothy away from her.

‘We had to stay with Pastor Raymond forever.’

‘Who’s he?’ I ask.

‘He baptised us. He’s got a gold phone and a big car.’

Silver says she doesn’t care about that, she says the truck’s the best thing on four wheels and she’s glad to be back in it. She shows me round. ‘This is my bed, and this is Melody’s.’

Silver stands square on the strip of red carpet in between the beds and points. ‘And that’s yours.’

‘I know that. I woke up in it yesterday. And I went to sleep in it last night.’ Melody does her tooth twitch from where she’s sitting on the bottom bunk.

‘After the snake?’ says Silver.

‘It was a mistake.’ I can’t think of anything else to say.

She points up. ‘There’s the window.’

I sigh now, then Silver’s frowning because I’m spoiling her tour. She’s telling me things I know already because there’s nothing to show.

‘OK then, Miss. Little Miss. You don’t know about this, do you?’

With a big yank, she pulls open the paisley curtain. Behind is a wooden bed with a patchwork cover. There’s a shelf of books above it with a golden clock next to them. On the floor is a pretty rug in the shape of an oval with blue fringes round the edge and a bunch of red roses in the middle. It’s in the right place so it’ll be warm to stand on when you get out of bed in the morning.

Silver stands by the bed with her back to me and puts her hand up to the shelf and touches a green leather book.

‘Pa’s notebook.’ They call Grandad Pa. Even though he isn’t their dad, they’ve told me that.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Sometimes he writes and writes for hours in it,’ says Melody.

Silver whips her hand away and puts it behind her back. ‘We’re not supposed to be touching it.’

I like the bedroom. ‘It looks like the granny’s bedroom in Little Red Riding Hood,’ I say.

Silver’s nose lifts up and the two holes there sneer at me. ‘I’ve heard about that. Fairy tales …’ she says. Like she’s way too old for all that.

‘Silver. I think you’re being mean,’ says Melody. Me and Silver both turn to look at her and her tooth flashes quickly.

‘Fairy tales are for babies,’ Silver says, ‘and the ungodly.’

I giggle then, because I can’t imagine God, if there really is one, bothering about ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’ or bears eating porridge. But both girls can’t see what’s funny, they stare at me with blank faces and their four shiny shoes pointing towards me.

I think of something. ‘What do you speak with Dorothy?’

‘What d’you mean?’ asks Silver.

‘I’ve heard you talk in a different language.’

‘Spanish,’ says Silver. ‘Of course.’

I turn away. The back doors of the truck are open. Outside I can see the great sky and Dorothy blowing on the ashes of our fire from last night.

I shiver and put my hands up to my neck and feel bare skin.

‘My hair,’ I cry out. ‘It’s gone short.’ I can’t believe I didn’t even notice the night before.

‘It looks good on you,’ says Melody from her bunk. She’s touching her own hair, that comes right down to her waist, with love.

I feel all over my head, and my hair’s got scrunched up into curls from being so short.

‘When did this happen?’

Silver shrugs and her frilly skirt goes up and down at the bottom.

‘You’ll need to get dressed,’ she says. ‘This is your closet.’ She opens a wooden cupboard at the top of my bed and the ice-cream dresses are there. I see a picture in my head then, of myself running through a great house, running and screaming. It hurts me to think about so I turn my face down to the floor so the twins won’t see.

‘You get dressed,’ says Silver, ‘and then we’ll play together.’

I put on the yellow dress.

I think of something important to ask Melody. ‘How did I get here?’

She’s playing with a doll on the bunk bed, brushing its long gold hair over and over.

‘I don’t know,’ she says, not interested. ‘The same way everyone does I s’pose.’ She goes back to the brushing.

Now I have a terrible thirst in my mouth so I go to ask for a drink. But there’s something I’ve heard about called ‘being disturbed in the head’. And I really think it might be happening to me. I’m putting one foot in front of the other and a horrible thing is happening. Someone’s pressing fast forward and I’m going into a speeded-up film. My feet are so quick they’re wheels like there’s an invisible bike I’m riding. In a tick I’m next to Dorothy, wondering how I got there so fast.

‘Please could I have some juice?’ I ask.

She pours some orange juice into a blue plastic cup and hands it to me. I don’t recognise the writing on the side of the carton. It’s not Tropicana like we have at home. I loved that word and sometimes I’d be looking at it for nearly an hour. Till Mum said — ‘Maybe I should put it back in the fridge now, it’ll be going off.’

This is different. It’s called 365 Everyday Value.

I take the cup. Thinking about Mum has made my throat hurt really badly.

‘Could you drink any more slowly?’ Dorothy’s watching me, waiting for the cup back. I thought I was drinking at normal speed but she’s there, tapping her foot, like I’m taking ages.

‘You’re like Old Father Time himself and there’s dishes to do and all manner of things. I can’t be standing here watching a girl drink for an hour.’

I hand the cup back, half full, not knowing what she means.

I’m shivering, freezing cold. ‘Where’s my coat?’ I ask.

‘It had to be thrown out, child. You’ll have to make do with one of the twins’ old things till we get you something else.’

My throat feels like it’s about to burst. ‘I wanted that,’ I say, but she’s moved away and doesn’t hear.

I make a silent promise to myself and Mum that when I get a new one it’ll be red. Somehow it’s the most important thing.

*

The speeding up and slowing down keeps happening. One minute I’m in the truck and in a flash I’ll be miles away, standing by the tree with no leaves that sticks out of the ground and has black burn marks. Far away there’s the four of them, waving and calling me back. Or I’ll be in bed and watching a drop of rain slide down the window — but it takes a whole day. Outside, a mushroom grows up out of the ground in front of my eyes. I play tea sets with the twins on a fold-up table and their voices go very fast and gabbling like chipmunks and they lift the cups to their lips and pretend to drink, over and over, and their hands move across the table, swapping things about so fast I feel dizzy. Silver speaks to me and the only thing I understand is my name at the end. I hang onto the pillowcase they’re using as a tablecloth and I close my eyes and their angry chipmunky squawks ring in my ears as the tea set things crash down.

Tonight, in bed, there’s light still in the air. I watch the twin in the top bunk and see her hair grow. Her long black plait flops over the edge and the tassel end of it goes downwards like black oil dribbling.

What’s happening? I ask myself. I’m seeing the hair grow right out of people’s heads.