The Girl in the Red Coat

26

DAY 100

I wrote it in my diary with the thick red felt pen I’d been using all along. I stared at the number. The act of writing those twin 0s had sent vibrations up my arm that now flew — wrapping themselves around my heart and pulsing into my brain.

I flicked backwards and forwards in the diary as I sat on the edge of the bed, the red numbers descending and increasing, animating — like one of those games where a figure is scratched on the edge of every page and can be made to walk by flipping the pages with your thumb. When I turned the page back to today the number 100 appeared to me as binoculars that she could be spotted through. I needed to take action; I needed Paul back.

He answered on the first ring.

‘Paul, don’t make some excuse not to talk to me.’ The phone fell silent but I knew he was still there. I could tell by the faint electrical hum like a bee breathing down the line.

‘I’m sorry, Beth,’ he said at last.

‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

‘I know, but I–I don’t even want to talk about it, it’s too awful. Talking about it makes it real.’ His voice sounded weak, like he’d been catastrophically sick or involved in a car accident.

‘That’s because it is.’ The energy that had somehow breathed itself into my body overnight I now sent spiralling down the curly cord of the phone towards Paul, as if it might jump-start him too. ‘Listen. I’m about to call Julie. I’m going to ask her to bring everyone round tonight that can make it.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Yes, all my friends. You know — from before. Nessa, Belinda.’ I paused. ‘Not Alice,’ I muttered, though I don’t think he heard that. ‘They’ve all been trying to get in touch but I’ve put off seeing them.’

Paul snorted. ‘Why tonight?’

‘It’s one hundred days, Paul.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise for everything, you don’t have to. I’d like you to come, and Lucy too. We need a leaflet, Paul.’

‘A leaflet?’ His voice was fading in and out. I imagined him lying on the sofa with his hand over his eyes.

‘Yes, to hand out. Or put through people’s doors. Stick up on lamp posts. You remember Nessa’s a graphic designer? Well, I’m going to ask her to help me design one on the computer.’ I tapped my fingernails on the hall table in a drumbeat. ‘Well, try and come.’

*

Julie, Kirsten, Rosie, Lynne, Nessa, Belinda — the old gang. Most had tried to contact me. Not all, though, not Sally. There were a few that stayed away but it was Sally’s silence that hurt. It was that memory of her, Carmel’s fingers kneading her scalp and Sally’s head falling back, her arms slumping by her sides — Oh my God, Carmel, that feels amazing. Don’t stop, don’t ever stop.

After I put the phone down I looked around the house and saw it as if for the first time. The illusion of tidiness was only because nothing was being moved about much. I walked round flicking switches in every room until light flooded the house. Everything was coated in a layer of dust. Cobwebs had sprung up around the doorways and it amazed me then that these spiders had been knitting away all the time in my grief-stricken presence. I made bucket after bucket of hot soapy water and scrubbed everything down, the floor, the table. The house was a stage — the thought came to me — a ritual would be played tonight. It needed to be ready. It needed props. I delved into the cupboard under the stairs and all I could find were Christmas decorations. I chose a few and draped artificial fir arrangements, clanking with pinecones, across the mantelpiece and looped coloured bulbs around the mug hooks.

Julie arrived first and I ran down the front path and embraced her plump pink-coated figure.

‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she said. ‘You’re so thin … Look, I’ve brought food.’

She’d come with cake and wine. Nessa arrived with soda bread. Goat’s cheese. Plump purple grapes. All of them brought something, until there was enough food to fill the table. A strange banquet. They reminded me of birds gathering round and lifting up the broken one of their flock onto their shoulders, bearing it along. They saw the decorations and didn’t comment — even though it must have seemed I’d gone crazy. Anyone passing, and seeing so many cars, would have imagined a party inside, and it was — of sorts.

Nessa brought her printer that could spew out thousands of coloured leaflets at a time. Candles, too, they brought candles, their baskets and carrier bags stuffed full of them.

‘They’re for after dinner,’ said Nessa, ‘if you’re OK with that. We didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Oh, oh …’ I thought: how weak these vigils look when you see them on television — the reedy singing, the dim light — anything sad and pathetic will finish me off.

‘We don’t have to — it’s fine. It’s just an idea we came up with.’ Her dark eyes, almost black, looked worried.

Something melted or collapsed within me. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, tearing chunks of bread and cramming them in my mouth because at last tonight I was starving. ‘Yes, that’s good — we’ll light them all. Like we used to do.’

Outside, the night was cool and clear. My friends set to work laying candles up the path, around the front door, like they were planting hundreds of stubby life forms — mushrooms — in the ground. Then with a taper each we lit them. I thought, oh God, they’re going to start singing or something. Please don’t let them do that. I won’t be able to stand it or to hold it together. They won’t be able to cope with what they see when I don’t.

But they just stood behind me as we watched the creeping glow of the candles burning brighter, reaching into the shadowy recesses of the front garden. Television can’t convey the spirit of candlelight — it was a means to ward off bad spirits, a challenge to the night. The smell of hot wax perfumed the air and the light flared, reaching further still until the picket fence was illuminated, and the dark figure standing there, watching.

‘Paul.’ I broke into a loping run towards him.

He stood the other side of the fence. The candlelight was faint here but I was shocked by what I saw. He’d aged — I didn’t know that could really happen — he looked like a Paul ten years in the future standing there.

‘You came, I’m so glad. And Lucy? Is Lucy here too?’

‘No. She wanted to but I’m trying to protect her from this as much as possible.’ Who was I to point out how futile that would be? ‘I didn’t bring the car, I walked here,’ he added, as if this would somehow explain something.

‘Shame. I wanted to apologise about how I’ve been with her. Come in,’ I said. ‘Come and have something to eat.’

He shook his head and I saw he felt a compulsion to stay outside and that if he entered the world inside there might be no possibility of escape. We stood, either side of the fence, watching the light and my friends wandering among the candles and relighting any that had been blown out by the breeze.

‘Why are you doing this, Beth?’

‘I’ve been frozen in ice, Paul. I had to make some kind of — movement. Or I was going to be frozen to death. One day someone was going to find me and I would be dead and stiff in bed. Something, surely, is better than nothing? Don’t you think that?’

He didn’t answer. I wondered what it looked like from the air — this bright flaring glow. I looked up and imagined my daughter as a moth, invisible against the dark sky. I started laughing and Paul stared at me as if I really had gone mad.

‘I’ve just realised.’

‘What?’

‘What it is we’re doing here tonight. We’re luring her back with light.’

‘With light?’

‘Yes, yes.’ I reached over and grasped his arm. ‘Can’t you see? We’re trying to show her the way home.’

*

Two weeks later I stood with Paul in her room. We held hands, as if locked in a seance where we could channel our daughter’s whereabouts. The evening of light might have brought Paul back instead of my daughter, but we were no longer husband and wife — or even ex-husband and ex-wife. We were brother and sister united in this strange bond.

Nothing. Only the creak as the wind tugged on the open window. I went to close it.

He turned and studied my map and then rested his forehead against it.

‘I’m so sorry, to have left you in all this. Saying it was your fault, that was unforgivable.’

‘That’s OK.’ I laid my hand on his back. ‘I want you to know, it’s not about us any more, it doesn’t exist. I don’t want you to worry about that but I need you back — as a father.’

‘I’ll drive you to the counsellor,’ he said, finally.

‘Thanks, Paul. That’s really kind.’

In the car we stayed silent for a while. I wound down the window and let the warm summer breeze blow over us.

‘There’s been nothing for weeks,’ said Paul eventually. ‘No new leads, nothing.’

‘I know.’

Leads — those invisible wires that could take us to her. Or Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs. The wind seemed to have scattered them and time snipped them off. He was right, there’d been nothing.

The country lane was now turning into suburbia. Nineteen-thirties houses lined the street. Paul pulled up.

‘Is this the one?’

I peered out of the window. Number 222. ‘Looks like it.’

‘Where did you find him?’

‘Out of the Yellow Pages.’

‘So the other psychologist not doing it for you?’

I shook my head. ‘Yes. No — I mean sort of.’ The police had put me in touch with a man who specialised in this sort of thing. It was helpful to some extent. All the same, I felt like it was part of a ‘process’.

‘I feel like I need to talk to someone fresh. Who doesn’t know me. You should talk to someone too, Paul.’

‘Maybe.’

I crunched up the gravel path and rang the bell, then studied the sunburst pattern on the stained glass. The man who opened the door was younger than I expected. At first I wondered if it was him, or if he was the door-opener for the real counsellor.

‘You must be Beth, come in.’ He wore jeans and a red T-shirt with Slinky written on it, no shoes, just socks. We shook hands awkwardly in his hallway. ‘I’m Craig. Come through.’

The room was neutral — cream walls, oatmeal carpet. Two chairs facing each other and a coffee table in between. There, tissues fluffed out into a pink rose: the only spot of colour.

‘Now, Beth.’ He settled back in his chair. ‘What would you like to talk about today?’

I looked through the French windows to the garden. A statue of Pan peeped with sly eyes from underneath a leaf. Craig appeared in his twenties. Could I really talk to him? What could he know about having children, or anything else for that matter? I looked at him; his dark brown eyes were patient, kind — why couldn’t the young know as much as the old? I learned that from Carmel.

I felt a welling inside of me. I had to unburden myself to someone.

‘My daughter …’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s missing.’

He started in his chair. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘She vanished. Four months ago. Nobody knows where she is.’

‘Oh God …’ He wiped his hands over his eyes. He looked suddenly even younger, his dark eyes and brows under hair bleached by the sun.

‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you.’ It hadn’t occurred to me to do that. The bubble I’d been living in was so complete, so intense, I’d almost forgotten anyone outside of that bubble could be affected — was real even. ‘You haven’t read anything in the papers?’

‘I’ve been in South America for a year. I mean, I’m sorry.’ He let out a shaky breath. ‘There are probably people who specialise in this sort of thing.’

A flare of anger puffed in my chest. ‘Are you trying to palm me off?’

‘No. It’s just …’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No, it’s fine. Let’s start again. What happened?’

I told him, briefly. ‘What sort of things do you normally see people about?’

‘Oh, unhappiness, you know, the human condition. People who need to reframe their lives.’

I shifted my eyes and looked at the single picture on the wall behind his shoulder. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was a forest, light filtering through the trees.

‘People don’t know what they have. But it’s easy for me to say that now.’

We sat in silence for a minute.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be shocked. But it is … shocking. I’d really like to help you, if I can.’

I glanced at his face again, he looked … a good person.

I nodded. ‘Yes, yes. Please.’

‘You tell me. You tell me where you’d like to start,’ he said.

I sat silent for a minute. ‘OK, then. I want someone to tell me it was my fault.’

‘I can’t do that, Beth.’

‘Nobody will say it. My husband did, at first. Then he took it back. I think it constantly and I want someone to say it.’

‘Why do you think it was your fault?’

I stayed quiet for a long time with my eyes closed. ‘Since the day she was born, I’ve thought I was going to lose her. Then I split up with my husband and the feeling overwhelmed me — and she did keep going off, so it wasn’t completely in my imagination, was it? Oh, it’s so difficult to fathom, but I do know the thought was in the back of my mind and then it happened and now I feel like I made it happen.’

I hadn’t told anyone this.

‘Then let’s talk about that.’

‘No. I can’t.’ My voice had turned tiny in the room. ‘Please, can we just sit for a while?’

We sat until the clock told us the hour was nearly up. I stood abruptly.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He showed me out. ‘I’d like to help if I can and see you again,’ he said, standing on the doorstep. ‘Can I ask if anything gives you relief, anything at all?’

‘Yes.’ I put my finger on the centre of the sunburst. ‘I thought it was going to be looking, but that’s turned into a kind of addiction. There’s also holes, forgetting holes I call them, but I don’t know if they really help either. There is one thing I keep coming back to though. Yes, one thing — tiny actions.’