The Girl in the Red Coat

27

The new place is a forest.

We help Dorothy unpack the van. She’s got a cooler that plugs into a hole at the front and keeps the food nice and cold. She’s got a special cupboard above Melody and Silver’s bunk where the food is in plastic containers with clip-on tops. There’s a wooden box where she keeps her tin openers and knives and spoons lined up very neat. The extra-big saucepan she uses to heat up water for us to wash has all the dishcloths and tea towels folded up inside it. I like the way Dorothy keeps everything. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ is one thing she says.

‘You children go into the woods and get some more sticks to light the fire,’ she says.

The three of us run into the woods with a basket she’s given us that’s made of pink plastic. Inside the woods there’s so many trees it goes suddenly dark and quiet.

Gramps has told us there’s a special event to happen here.

‘What are you thinking the “event” is?’ asks Silver. She finds a stick and pops it into the basket.

‘I dunno. Maybe there’ll be candy.’ Melody sounds hopeful.

‘You never know with Gramps. Might be nothing,’ I warn them. All the same I feel something’s going to happen here. I felt it as soon as we came.

The other two nod and we carry on picking up sticks.

‘Look, Carmel. There’s a great big one.’ Melody picks up a stick as big as her arm. ‘Why don’t you carry it back? Then Mom will be pleased with you.’

‘Thank you.’ I take the stick, thinking how kind Melody is. I see her tooth gleaming in the dark.

‘I’m glad Carmel’s with us now. Aren’t you, Silver?’ Melody sneaks her hand into mine and holds it.

Silver’s picking up a stick, holding it with the ends of her fingers and trying not to get her hands dirty.

‘I guess …’ She throws the stick in the basket and brushes her hands together to get rid of the dirt.

‘And I’m glad you’re here,’ I whisper. It feels like we can say anything here, just the three of us under the dark trees. ‘I’m glad I’m with some other children.’

Silver puts her hands on her hips. ‘Why do we always have to be moving around? It’s not fair. I want to be with lots of children and have schoolbooks and a lunch bag, like we used to.’

‘You don’t go to school? Everyone has to go to school.’

‘No. That’s not true. We don’t. Anyway, it’s better we don’t have to.’ That’s not what she was saying before.

‘What about having a lunch bag and learning things? How do you learn anything?’

‘Mom teaches us. And Pa gives us Bible study, he says that’s all we need.’ Her voice has gone scratchy.

‘What sort of things does Dorothy teach you?’

‘Sometimes math. We have to add up numbers of the dollars she’s saved. Or how many miles it is to Mexico.’

‘I wish there was a library we could go to here,’ I sigh. I’ve had a sneaky look at the books on the shelf above Dorothy and Gramps’s bed, but they all seem like the Bible sort.

Silver snorts ‘Huh’, like books are useless.

‘Carmel’s our friend now, though, aren’t you? It’s like we’ve got a school friend with us,’ says Melody all shy.

I have an idea.

‘Maybe we could start our own school,’ I say.

They like that idea, I can tell. They both stop what they’re doing and look at me.

‘How d’you mean?’ asks Silver.

‘In the truck — we could have school time. We could get some books and do lessons from them. And have sandwiches in a lunch box at lunchtime. And do, I dunno, sums and things. And art projects.’

We did an art project in my school making a dinosaur out of papier mâché — everyone in the class working on a different bit. It’d been finished for ages and was going dusty on top of the bookshelf but Mrs Buckfast said she was determined to get it hung by wires from the ceiling next term. I suppose I’m never going to see it dangling over us now. I made some of the scales on its tail.

‘Yeah, let’s,’ says Melody. ‘What d’you think, Silver?’

‘Who’d be the teacher?’ Silver asks.

I think. ‘We could take turns. And if Dorothy has time, maybe she could teach us something too. Something she knows about.’

Melody says, ‘Mom has pictures of skulls. She keeps them hidden.’ The words shiver through my body.

‘What? Human skulls?’

Melody nods. Her eyes have gone huge. ‘Yeah, they look like this.’ She bunches her hands around her mouth with her fingers pointing downwards to look like teeth.

‘Why does she have them?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says through her fingers.

‘That’s got nothing to do with school,’ says Silver.

We’re quiet for a minute. ‘You really want to do it?’ I ask.

‘Let’s start tomorrow,’ says Silver. ‘C’mon. We’ve got loads now.’

We run back to the truck together.

‘Good girls. Good girls,’ says Dorothy when she sees our basket. She gets on her hands and knees and starts piling the sticks on the ground.

The tall trees saw up and down in the breeze and not far away is a wide river moving past us and next to it a beach made of pebbles. I slide over the pebbles in my stiff shoes and look out over the water. In the middle there’s such great swirls of black it looks like there’s no bottom to it. I feel it again, that feeling that something is going to happen, and a brown leaf blows in front of me and lands on my shoe.

Dorothy is busy organising things: ‘Get the pan … no, not that one, the one with the long handle … bring the wood for the fire … see to it, girls … Now open those tins of beans, Silver. Put them in the big pan. We’ll have a cowboy dinner. No fire in the dinner tonight, Carmel,’ she calls over.

I think she might be liking me again. She gives me a proper smile and I try to forget about what Melody told me, about the skulls.

We all have something to do. My job is getting out the spoons and knives and putting them ready on a clean cloth on the ground.

That’s when Gramps comes from behind the truck and says a word: ‘baptism’.

Sometimes words have colours. ‘Tropicana’ is orange, of course.

‘Baptism’ is white, white, white. Except when it comes out of Gramps’s mouth and then it’s black. Black like his Bible. He seems to have grown. His shoulders are enormous and his great arms hang down either side.

Gramps takes off his shoes and socks and his feet are blue and bony on the pebbles. He gets me to do the same and holds my hand. ‘Spirit’s in the river, Carmel,’ he cries out. Dorothy and the girls come over and line up on the shore, waiting.

The cold’s such a shock it knocks words right out of me. I stumble, with Gramps’s arm tight round me, until we get so deep my skirt pops up. Gramps reads from the Bible in the hand that’s not holding me and there’s a big drop of water hanging from his nose that jiggles about as he reads.

On the pebble beach Dorothy and the twins have started singing:

Are you washed in the blood?

Are you washed in the blood?

In the cleansing blood, the cleansing blood of

the lamb …

The sound spreads over the water and mixes in with the rushing of the river.

Lamb’s blood, river water — I smell them both. I can taste them.

Then the Bible goes in his pocket and his big hand goes over my face and I can smell lamb’s blood on that too and the river pours this into my ears — ‘And her old name shall be set aside. She will be named in the Lord, and the name she will bear will be Mercy …’

His hand shuts up my eyes. He pushes me hard, backwards.

The spirit river must be strong. It snatches me off him and starts carrying me away.

I pop up, and they’re bright puppets — Gramps walking towards me with his arms reaching out, shouting, ‘She’s banged her head.’ Melody on the shore and crying something out through brambles and her getting scratched up by thorns and tearing her dress.

Then down again, just long enough to see a white face in the water, an arm, a swirling down below. And it’s my mum, my mum, my mum. Her beautiful face, the sound of my name coming through the water, ‘Carmel, Carmel.’ Then nothing.

Everything black like I’ve been shut inside his Bible for good.

*

Gramps is on top of me pressing up and down on my chest and the pebbles press into my back.

‘Mum.’ Water bubbles out of my mouth.

‘I got you, child,’ Gramps is saying as he pumps. ‘I rescued you. I rescued you.’

‘No. Mum.’ I try to fight him off and he has to hold down my arms.

Melody’s got a long scratch in the middle of her face and it’s bleeding hard. Dorothy carries me inside the truck. She has to peel off my clothes and wraps me in a blanket and puts me on my bed.

‘Carmel nearly got killed,’ wails Melody. She’s standing there with slits cut in her dress and patches of blood from the thorns, I hold out my hand and touch one on her arm and my finger comes away red.

Dorothy takes off Melody’s dress and there’s scrapes all over her body.

‘Oh my Lord, child, child.’ Melody starts crying even louder. She’s standing there just in her yellow pants.

‘Hush, hush,’ says Dorothy. She goes to the fire and pours hot water into a bowl. Then she comes back in and drips something from a blue bottle into the water and starts dabbing at Melody’s cuts with cotton wool.

‘It’s alright. It’s surface cuts is all.’ But still the water in the bowl goes pink and then red.

‘Now stand very still, my girl. I can see a thorn.’ She gets some tweezers and frowns hard as she picks it out. ‘And another. And another. Child, you’re a pincushion.’ She picks them out one by one and I huddle into the blanket to keep warm.

When she’s done she tells Melody to stand there in her pants with her skin in the air to make the bleeding dry up. It does really fast.

‘You’re a real quick healer, Melody,’ she tells her. She puts on Melody’s nightie for her and tells her to go sit by the fire.

She picks up my dress from the floor. ‘Ruined,’ she says. She holds it up and I can see it’s got stones and little shells and bright green weeds tangled through the lace.

Dorothy’s long hair is loose around her face. She’s lost the smile she had earlier. I think of my mother’s face, full of soft white light, and the word she sent through the water telling me my real name. I want to die then. I want to go back into the river and stay there with her.

‘I wish Gramps never rescued me,’ I sob.

‘That’s a foolish thing to say. Who doesn’t want to be rescued?’

‘Me.’

‘Foolish and wicked and …’ She rubs my hair hard in a towel, getting her fingers right into my skull to do it properly. I don’t want her to stop. It feels like what’s she’s doing is the real rescuing, rubbing me back to life.

When she does stop I feel awful again. ‘I want to be in the river, I don’t want to be here.’

Dorothy looks into my face. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

I stay quiet.

‘You’ll even get accustomed to being called Mercy. I took a different name. I chose Dorothy from a movie. They wanted me to have a sacred name, but I said it’s Dorothy or nothing.’

‘What’s your real name then?’

She doesn’t answer, she just carries on: ‘We can all get accustomed to most anything, names … anything.’ I can see as her eyes turn inwards and look at the things inside her brain. ‘I have. When I came from Mexico we had only the clothes we stood up in and … oh, I miss the colours there.’

She stops rubbing me then and looks as upset as me.

‘Why can’t you go home?’

‘Because I’m getting away from a crazy man. And I came here to make a better life, one with business opportunities.’

‘What’s business opportunities?’

‘Well, for a start, you’re one. All you need to do is be a good girl and do as you’re told and everything will be very prosperous and A-OK and there’ll be a lovely house and maybe even a car — Mercedes. Being called Mercy is not so bad if you’re riding in the back of a Mercedes, is it?’

I don’t know what she’s on about.

‘My name,’ I say slowly, but trying not to be upsetting, especially as I liked the way she rubbed my hair so much, ‘is Carmel. Mum said it’s a name of a place that’s supposed to be like paradise and it’s Catholic like her mum and dad. Dad liked it because it sounds like caramel.’

Dorothy looks like she doesn’t care what my name is or what it means, as long as I stop causing so much trouble for her. She scrubs me so hard on my body with the towel it hurts but at least I feel dry and start to warm up. I don’t even mind about being naked in front of her, except for the towel.

Then I’m wrapped in a blanket, sitting in front of the campfire, my teeth chatting away like they’re trying to talk on their own. I can taste the river in my mouth and behind my nose. A big bump is growing out of my forehead that when I touch it feels a long way away from my head like it’s been stuck on. They’re all eating beans with spoons out of plastic bowls. Except for Melody, who says it hurts her to move. I’ve got on my nightie now, the one with the pink roses. And warm socks and a big thick jumper from the twins and one of Dorothy’s cardigans over that and then a blanket round me and still I can’t get warm, not right inside me.

Gramps has lost the lit-up energy. He’s gone back to looking out of the corners of his eyes. Dorothy takes a ladle of beans from the pan hanging over the fire and puts it in a plastic bowl.

‘Here. Have some beans, Mercy, build your strength up.’

But I thought I’d said to her … ‘Carmel. I’m Carmel,’ I say.

‘I think Mercy is a beautiful name, don’t you think so, girls?’ asks Gramps.

‘Can we have new names, like Mum and Mercy?’ asks Silver.

‘No,’ Dorothy almost shouts. ‘Your names will not change.’

Gramps says, ‘Mercy is very special, Silver. Not all little girls need a new name.’

She’s going to hate me now. Sure enough, her eyes turn into slits looking at me through the fire.

‘Does this mean we can soon be putting down the deposit on a condo?’ Dorothy’s asking. And even though I’ve got no idea what a condo is I can see by the way she turns her head and looks at me when she says it that her having one has something to do with me.

Gramps raises both hands to quiet everyone. ‘Stop. Isn’t it enough to know that Mercy has come to us through fire, that she is part of us now and we have a new name to celebrate …?’

That’s enough. I jump up. ‘I’ve got a name already and it’s Carmel. You’re trying to make me forget it but I won’t.’ I don’t tell them how Mum was there in the river to remind me and losing my name would be like pretending she’d never been alive. They wouldn’t believe me.

‘Sssh, dear,’ says Gramps. ‘No need to be upsetting yourself. Come, come and eat some of these beans. It’ll do you good to eat something.’

‘I don’t want any beans,’ I shout. ‘I just want my mum. I want my mum. And you shouldn’t give beans to the twins either. It makes them fart all night.’

Melody puts her hands up to her mouth and laughs when I say that.

I’ll run away, I think. I’ll run off and hide and they’ll never find me. So I hug the blanket around me and take off towards the trees. I can feel the bottom of my socks turning soggy. There’s shouts behind me, but it’s too late. The blanket falls off but I leave it on the ground.

Inside the woods I crouch down, panting, behind a lump of ferns. I can see, through the leaves, everyone standing in the twilight round the fire and pointing towards the trees. There’s Gramps — the size of a toy from where I am — going to fetch his donkey jacket from the truck.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to keep quiet and stick my fingers into the soft earth. Then there’s a tramp, tramp, tramp as Gramps gets closer. He makes the ferns brush against my face as he walks past them.

I can hear him for a long time walking round the woods. When he comes near to me he sounds like a wolf, hunting and sniffing. But, after a while, even the wolf gives up. It goes back to the fire and I can see him, looking into the flames. Sometimes Dorothy stands with her hands on her hips, looking into the trees too, her long skirt nearly touching the ground.

Then dark: I stand up, as quiet as I can, and turn to the woods. It’s black in there and noises come out of the darkness, animals moving round. What do I do now? Do I wander about the night woods until I get eaten by a real wolf? Or lost, and starve to death? And the woods are so scary in the dark. There’ll be ghosts in them, getting ready for fun and games — pulling my hair and pinching me with their skeleton fingers. I can almost hear them now, licking their bare teeth with invisible tongues.

I look back at the camp and the four people sitting round the fire lit up by the flames. I watch them for a long time as they talk and then boil a kettle and look at the trees again and stir the fire.

In the end I just go back out. I don’t know what else to do.

Dorothy makes me go to bed with nothing to eat and Gramps says I need to think about what sins I’ve committed by running away. But I don’t. In the night Melody climbs in my bed with me and we hug each other.

‘You’ll keep calling me Carmel, won’t you? You can do it in secret if you don’t want to get in trouble.’

‘Is it real important?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I will.’

‘Thank you for trying to rescue me,’ I say.

‘That’s OK,’ she whispers back.