The Girl in the Red Coat

32

DAY 180

I bought the textbooks in a second-hand shop.

Biology books. I wiped the dust from the green covers and took them to the old man behind the wooden counter.

‘All of them?’ he asked. There were only three — he couldn’t get a lot of custom.

‘Yes, please.’

I opened the cover of the one on top of the pile. It had been published in 1969.

‘Except …?’ Then I smiled. ‘Sorry, I thought the information might be out of date. But of course — the human body — it doesn’t go out of date, does it?’

It was a task I’d set myself. The ‘tiny actions’ I’d talked about with Craig had expanded. Now I told him: ‘Tiny actions, for other people.’

I’d had an idea: maybe one day I could train to be a nurse. Maybe actions for other people would be a key. It was too soon, everyone said, and of course it was, but I made a deal with him. I would try and cut down on my looking and study some biology, if I could concentrate. The police investigation had gone quiet, for now, though I didn’t know if that would make it harder or easier.

It helped, somehow, learning the human body: the spinal cord consists of areas of white and grey matter … the back of the eye is filled with clear jelly … muscle contraction can be voluntary (controlled by will) or involuntary (automatic, i.e. reflex).

On a good day I felt I was nearing some mystery of human existence: eyes, hands, feet, womb, fingernails. As if Carmel had not been taken but had shattered apart into fragments. An explosion of particles, fine like glass, and I could somehow learn to knit her back together again. I could feel her textures under my fingers. The slide of my thumb across a clean curl. The crispy skin of a healing cut. Bone, at the ankle — raw and knobbly. Meanwhile, her map grew. When a name came to me I hadn’t thought of before — even some hardly known acquaintance I’d almost forgotten — I’d slip into her room and add it there. I’d had to stick two extra huge sheets of paper next to the others to cope with the burgeoning network. I kept at it but it never seemed to tell me anything that made sense.

Good days had tracts of calm. But on a bad day I wanted to visit violence on myself, at the same time knowing how I had to stay well and healthy. That, despite everything, I had to stay whole. So, I let myself wander there in my head. I’d have visions of severing my spine with bolt cutters. Cracking my head against the wall so a long spill of blood ran down and pooled on the floor around my toes. Smashing my hand through the window and scraping it back and forth on the broken glass. It gave me a relief, these visions. But I knew I couldn’t linger in their technicolor for too long.

I had to stay sane.

Tiny actions. I planted up the container by the front door with bulbs for next spring.

‘Well done,’ my mother said when she arrived, a Waitrose grocery bag in each hand. My parents stayed often now, in my house. Mum cooked and Dad pottered around the garden. It was like time had gone backwards and here we were, just the three of us again. Mum, Dad and Beth. They paid my bills too, for the time being, since returning to work still defeated me.

‘That’s good. I’ll make you something to eat. Something light, we have to keep you alive, darling. We have to keep on going.’

We did.

The heart is a hollow, inverted pear-shaped muscle. Inside it is divided into four chambers …

Next spring, I think, then it will have been a whole year.