The Girl in the Red Coat

31

I’m hardly ever left on my own.

While everyone’s off doing different things I stand in the truck and look out over the green lake we’re parked next to and hum a little tune.

I go looking for the stone egg but all I can feel now is a soreness where it used to be. I’m guilty for a second but then I think: it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about Mum, it means I don’t have to die myself because that stone egg was killing me slowly.

Being on my own is making me think of being untrustworthy again. This truck is a whole box of secrets and they’re all calling to me and want to tell me things. Skulls, Mercy — they get mixed up so sometimes I think of opening Mercy’s book and seeing a skull where her face should be. It gives me chills.

‘Detective Wakeford is here again,’ I say, and just saying that the chills have gone and I’m shaking I’m so excited.

‘Mercy, where are you?’ I search with my eyes but because her book is so thin it must be squashed between the others. One by one I start slipping out the books to see if she’s trapped between them. My hand brushes the leather of Gramps’s notebook and then that calls out to me too, louder than anything else. Dare I? Dare I? I don’t know how long I’ve got. I bite my lip.

Gramps’s writing is large with lots of loops, pages and pages of it. I’m a good reader though. I was the best in my class. Mostly it seems to be prayers he’s writing. My name — my eye catches on it and I stop breathing. Then I read and I can’t stop because I’ve found a place where Gramps is writing about me and what he says gets the prickles going.

It was You, God, who told me to visit that island.

For a long time I did not know why. But when I first saw Carmel I knew. Oh Lord, I knew, I knew, I knew. Thank you. I’d been so troubled and confused. Forgive me for doubting. But I thought: I have a divine road but how am I ever supposed to take the first step along it, Lord, if you do not provide me with a map? I am lost. I was a doubting Thomas. I admit that now. But when I saw her I knew I had found my map, my compass, my way ahead. And maybe in time, she will release me from my own pain? Is that selfish? Is that wrong? I think not. No.

It took a long time. It took careful planning. Seeing her in that place called Boston was a sign, I’m sure of it. For I did not know there was even a Boston in that blighted isle and the other one is my birthplace so praise God. But I couldn’t have her then, not that time. Softly, softly I told myself on that first encounter — you can wait a month, a year. You can wait a lifetime. She’s truly my child and she belongs to me. I concentrated on the foolish woman she was with, her wrists covered in bracelets that looked like plaits and covering some Godless attempt at taking her own life no doubt. ‘Paul and Beth,’ she kept saying, ‘Paul and Beth wouldn’t take all this seriously,’ and after some time I realised she was talking about the child’s birth parents. She told me everything I needed to know, the riven family and their ways, so she must have been Your instrument without knowing that day. I clothed myself in dark disguise, planning even then, the notion forming as quick as a baby being conceived … so my voice flattened out to sound like hers, my hand over my face as I spoke. Little Carmel at the front of the church amongst the flowers and later when I saw her approach I could barely breathe and I shrank back into the shadows and made those my disguise — into a dark corner like a spider where I could observe the wonder of her.

It was an agony of waiting till I finally found myself outside their house. I can spend days, I thought, I have eternal patience. I am on fire. And seeing them leave and speeding along with them on the train, me and the holy ghost not two seats down. And into that Godless place — stories! There is only one story and that is the suffering on the cross.

No one was interested in my pamphlets — the ones spreading Your word. I saw people dropping them in the mud and then they’d be walked on. It made me so angry seeing the muddy boots pounding Your word into the ground. I could feel the wounds of Jesus opening up wider every time I saw it happen.

Mercy is lost to me now. She wasn’t the real article, she was sent as … as a precursor. It’s fitting she’ll be ever hereafter left on that cold island. She was John the Baptist to Jesus and ordained she had to go the way of John the Baptist. She’s lost to me. Lost.

I had to go back for the car and all the time of driving the terror that I might have missed my chance, it might be too late. I was so on fire with God’s work I found it hard to contain myself — wandering the field in a ferment of pain and fear that she could be lost. Then I saw the blood-red garment and this time I kept it in my sight. It was my sign from You — however else would I have kept picking her out? Praise God.

It was as if she was on wires. Fine silver wires grew from her and around her like a divine cage. They shone out through the fog too. She couldn’t see them, nor anyone else. Only me. This girl surrounded by the ignorant, ignorant of the Lord. By those wanting their heads filling with unbelief and base tales, when the only tale to tell, Lord, is the one of You, suffering on the cross — I say it again as it’s the only truth.

I followed her, mortally terrified she would be lost to the crowd, by the great foul mass gawping and eating and counting out their money. But the red of her coat, that was my talisman, it enabled me to keep her in my sight.

She turned to smile at me and my heart felt pierced through with longing. For her gift, for her divine gift. Forgive me, Lord, but I was jealous then. I wanted it for myself — I thought again: a mere child? Except I can have her, I thought. I can have her. She’ll work through me.

I never lost her once. Not even when she went under the table. I nearly made my move then … but ‘wait, wait,’ I told myself, and it was as if You were guiding my every step that day. No, I never lost her, not like her careless mother. That was my real sign, that and when she smiled.

Because when she smiled at me the silver wires throbbed around her, they grew and spun out, shining all around, arcing through the air.

And the red, it was Your divine heart, right in the middle of those bestial unbelievers.

It was there, just for me.

Thank you Lord.

As I’m coming to the end of the page I hear something outside and I shove the book back onto the shelf — quick, quick. Dorothy’s face is at the open door and she’s looking at me hard.

‘What have you been up to, child?’

‘Nothing.’

She stands staring at me and I’m trying to stop my face going red. I’m not doing very well though. There’s burning on my cheeks and ears like I’m on fire.

‘Well, if I find out you have — children in my country get whipped. They get whipped good and proper till their legs burn.’

Maybe she thinks I’m getting upset. Maybe I look it, though what I really am is scared and guilty, because she says, ‘Have an apple.’ She holds out a big yellow one with her hand flat, like you do with a horse. ‘They’re sweet and juicy …’

I shake my head. What she’s saying is nice, but not the way she’s saying it, trying to frighten me. At home there’s a picture of Snow White’s wicked stepmother holding out an apple with poison in it. If she bites into that apple, which she does, she falls asleep for a hundred years.

Dorothy snatches the apple back and walks off. I watch her long plait bouncing against her thin back. For a minute I hate her. I think, you don’t even care about me at all — and I’m running after her. She hears me coming and whips round, quick, quick.

‘I know about you. I know how you keep pictures of human skulls.’ It’s out of my mouth before I know it. I do a big gasp and clap my hand over my mouth as if I could shove the words back in.

She leans back on her feet and crosses her arms and looks at me.

‘What you know, child, is nothing. Nothing about nothing. Go inside.’ Light from the lake moves over her face.

Tears come into my eyes. Maybe Dorothy will be like a proper enemy now. ‘What d’you want?’ she says, when I don’t move.

A big sob comes out. ‘I want you to love me again. You’re supposed to be like my mum. My mum never had any pictures of skulls.’

She’s quiet. I can see she’s thinking.

‘OK then.’ She takes my hand and we go inside. Then she slides her hand under the mattress and pulls out squares of paper. Some of the skulls look like they’re laughing, others are in screams. I hate them, they’re the worst things I’ve ever seen. Now they’ll be inside my mind forever.

‘There, satisfied?’

‘But Dorothy,’ I put my hands up to my face, ‘what, what are they, why d’you keep them?’

‘The Day of the Dead. My ancestors.’ She looks at them. ‘Come outside, child.’

I follow her. She takes a blue plastic lighter out of her pocket that she uses for the fire and touches the flame to the corner of the pictures. Some birds out on the water start flapping and fighting and I nearly jump out of my skin because for a moment I think the skulls have come to life and started shrieking.

‘Now, see, what is it you’re talking about?’

The open mouths scream through the fire that licks their bony faces and then crisp up to burned flakes on the ground. Dorothy stamps on them so they turn into dust twirling away in the wind.

‘There. Nothing can be made from nothing, can it, child?’ That’s what she said before. ‘And if it is I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him you’ve been stealing from the Bible. He won’t like that, will he?’ As she walks off I watch as the ash blows in a puff out over the water.

I sit on the steps and I don’t stop shaking for ages. Whenever Dorothy’s horrible it makes me feel so bad I want to die. Tears trickle down the side of my face. But then I start feeling better, strong even. Dorothy had to burn her horrible skulls because of me.

I’m taking everything out one by one and looking at it like a policeman. I even think about looking for the book with Mercy in it again but then I change my mind. I’ve been in enough trouble for one day.

And I’ve read Gramps’s secrets, even if I don’t understand them. The way he talks in his book is weird like there’s something wrong with him. Even if it is just Bibleish stuff, I remember telling myself about keeping an eye on him and when I stop shaking I go to find him. He’s chopping wood with an axe and I watch him for a bit when he doesn’t know I’m there.

He spots me at last. ‘Carmel, what are you doing? Standing there and staring.’ He straightens up. There’s a pile of chopped wood next to him and the cut insides are leaking. There’s some lazy flies swooping round his head.

‘Nothing.’

He sees something in my face has changed. He’s good at that, Gramps, but he does it different to me — he does it by watching and listening.

‘Come on, dear. Tell me all about it.’

‘Gramps, why did you and Mum fall out?’ I ask it quickly before I have a chance to change my mind. He called Mum ‘careless’ in his book but I can’t mention that because he’ll know I’ve been reading it. Even though I could tell him he’s wrong.

He pats a log for me to sit on. ‘Now Carmel, we don’t need to be dwelling on past history, we …’

‘But why can’t you tell me? Is it a secret?’

His eyes have gone very pale and I start to feel afraid then, but he puts his arm round me and says in a soft kind voice, ‘I didn’t agree with how she chose to live her life, her marriage. I regret it now, of course I do, I’m full of remorse in my prayers …’

His shoulders start heaving up and down and his hands go up to his face and his throat is making dry sobs. He’s got his energy tight wrapped up inside him and tears ooze from under his hands. He starts looking like a big animal that’s been hurt by a hunter.

‘Gramps, don’t cry,’ I say at last.

‘Child, what an exhibition I make of myself.’ He rubs at his face with his arm.

I put my hand on his arm. ‘You just miss her, that’s all. Same as me.’ And even though he’s been upset I’m glad to know he does.