The Girl in the Red Coat

34

DAY 260

On the cusp of the old year turning into the new I walked into the sea. I’d spent the early morning … looking, of course. What else?

I parked up. Even though I knew they thought it fruitless, my parents had bought me a car, the better to help with the looking. The biology textbooks gathered dust under my bed. I never went too far: all too soon I’d have that irresistible tug — go home, go back, she could be there, waiting. By now, was there a blade of grass I hadn’t lifted in this county? Or the three counties around for that matter. It didn’t matter; it might not be the right blade of grass. Not the one.

Cromer beach: a flat grey sky pressing onto grey sea; me: a mashed pink worm between the two. All the making of leaflets and maps; fundraising to put adverts in the press; planting bulbs; the endless cups of tea and the phone calls seemed on that day to be useless flotsam to be smashed apart in an overpowering sea of circumstance. New Year’s Eve took me back to new beginnings — I could almost feel the sharp, pleasantly acidic breeze that promised to blow the winds of change into our lives nearly a year ago. And they had, oh, they had. The thought of the new year yawning ahead seemed impossible.

I didn’t even mean to kill myself but never had anything looked so inviting as that freezing grey sea. I shed my clothes as I ran towards it, scattering them across the pebbles. Then the plunge and the ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’ It felt exquisite — this pain that flooded through my body and punched everything else away. I swam, further out towards the horizon, the waves pounding at my body till I went weak and slack. A thought drifted into my frozen brain. I could give up, here, now. The thought was enticing and refused to go away. It bloomed out like a growing flower speeded up by the camera until it was touching the sides of my skull and there was no room for anything else.

Maybe, if there was another world beyond that flat horizon, that’s where she would be waiting. Not outside my house.

I let myself sink and my mouth fill up with seawater and the thick saltiness of it scoured out my mouth and nasal passages. I tried, I really did, I tried my very best to drown. But every time some involuntary convulsion of my body sent me gasping and choking to the surface, sucking for the life-giving air I didn’t want. It was like trying to kill a machine.

Then after the sea had got fed up tossing me about it sicked me up onto the pebbles and in the distance I saw Paul scanning the beach and the horizon. When he saw me he started running. He was wearing a long black coat that flapped behind him as he ran and as he got nearer I could hear his words: ‘Beth, for God’s sake, Beth. Dear God, let her be alive.’ Then closer, he could see I had breath in my body.

He lifted me up with surprising ease and carried me away from the sea’s clutches. I had on my knickers but the sea had swallowed up my bra. Not that I cared. He was shouting as he carried me, not at me but at the world. ‘What now? What more, for Christ’s sake?’

I was dumped on the pebbles and then felt his big coat fold around me before he went to retrieve my scattered clothes. Numbed, I watched him whip them up quickly, angrily, and hang them over his other arm, for all the world like he was clearing up after a messy kid.

Then he came and dumped the pile at my feet and threw himself next to me.

‘I could only find one of your shoes.’ He looked at me and I could see the horror in his eyes. ‘God, Beth, your lips are bright blue.’ I let him tuck the coat more tightly around me and scrub at my face and feet with his big hands.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked eventually, my words sounding like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s through clenched teeth and cold-stiffened lips.

‘I drove over to see you this morning.’ He took my hand and held it there, putting his other on top to melt the iciness. ‘And you weren’t there, so I came looking for you. I wanted to see that you were OK. New Year is always a funny time. I drove round for a bit and saw your car parked back there.’ He jerked his head backward. ‘Christ, Beth. What the hell were you doing? What good did you think that was going to do?’ He was almost shouting, and once again I marvelled at how often his go-to reaction had been anger where mine was grief. I almost envied him for it; at least anger had a burn.

‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ I muttered, the clenched teeth locking together. ‘I wasn’t even trying to kill myself … really. I wanted to be, I don’t know. Blank, I suppose. For the relief.’

We had nothing to say for a moment and the shushing of the sea moved into the gap. Slowly, I watched the anger hiss out of his body, leaving him limp.

‘Paul, do you ever wish we hadn’t had her?’

He looked startled for a moment: he hadn’t been expecting that.

‘No. Never, not once.’

‘I have.’ It was true. I was sometimes plagued with the thought that if I’d never had her all this couldn’t have happened. But now, now — I was destined forever to have a small red ghost following and chattering at my heels until the day I died and even beyond … if there really was something there. A comfort? Maybe. Not really. Because even there she might elude me and I’d have to go on looking and looking and there would be no end to it, ever.

‘I feel bad for thinking it. But I do, sometimes.’

‘I don’t think we should feel guilty for anything, Beth. Not for anything we feel or anything we think. No one else knows. No one. And if they say they do they’re liars.’

‘I think sometimes it was because I got distracted.’

‘Distracted?’

‘Yes. By my jealousy. By you. That it’s my fault. My attention wasn’t where it should’ve been and it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been focusing on what I should have — other things too. The feeling I was going to lose her, they were all bricks, you see, bricks in what happened. Built one after the other.’ My voice sounded rambling and hysterical, even to my own ears.

‘Beth, it’s not your fault.’

‘You said before it was.’

‘I’ve told you, I was distraught, I wasn’t in my right mind.’

Then a sudden urge seized me, like the one that made me walk into the sea, and I picked up a rock and smashed at the middle finger of my other hand, which was splayed out on a flat stone. Paul didn’t move to stop me. When I felt I was done, and my finger was a bruised plum, I heaved the rock and threw it down the beach.

‘Oh fuck, Beth. Fuck.’ He moved in and put his arms round me. ‘It’s OK. I understood, I understand why you did that. Does it hurt? It must do.’

Instinctively I drew my hand up to my mouth, for comfort.

‘Let me look.’ He took my hand and gently examined it. ‘Nothing broken.’ I tucked it into the coat. He put his arms around me again and we both looked out to sea.

‘I think about her all the time, all the time. I try and find answers. I —’ He paused. ‘Did you ever think, did you think Carmel,’ there, he’d said it, ‘was a bit eccentric?’

‘Sort of. I told you once, I think. Did you?’

‘Truthfully, yes. It bothered me sometimes. I wanted her to fit in. I used to think maybe she was a bit, you know, like those Asperger’s kids. She was so clever but in other ways really not.’

‘I think she was on some spectrum or other. But I don’t think it was Asperger’s.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sometimes I wonder.’

‘What?’

‘If it could have anything to do — to do with what happened. But how can it have?’

I shook my head again. ‘I don’t know, Paul. I’m at the end of knowing, of thinking anything.’

‘Lucy tries to help. She’s been very understanding, but I think there’s things only we can understand.’

‘It must be hard for her.’

‘Yes. She wanted kids, you know, but now …’

‘It must be very hard for her,’ I said again.

We sat together for a while and it struck me that we’d never had such an honest conversation in all our years of marriage. Then he helped me up and guided me to his car, tucking my clothes and one shoe into the footwell.

‘Come home with me. We’ll get your car later.’

*

Lucy greeted us at the door as Paul helped me up their neat little suburban path. If she was horrified at seeing me barefoot, covered in Paul’s coat and with damp and matted hair, she managed to keep it to herself.

‘She’ll need a hot bath,’ explained Paul.

‘No. That’s the worst thing you can do. I’ll run a tepid one and we’ll top it up slowly. The hot water’s too much of a shock for the system otherwise.’

‘Lucy’s a care assistant,’ explained Paul.

‘Oh,’ I said. I hadn’t known that about her. In fact I didn’t really know anything about her, save that I’d hated her in some dim past that didn’t matter any more. I realised I was standing on the same patch of cream carpet where I’d put my boots before. This time, my feet were caked in sand and dirt.

‘Sorry Lucy,’ I said. But she wasn’t there and in the background I could hear bathwater running.

What is this thing that happens? When disaster strikes and women come, with their cakes and their bandages, with their cups of tea and their soothing fingers. It’s the complicity of the birthing chamber, the laying out of the dead. They pick the bits of tragedy up off the floor and try to knit them together in some shape, the way I’d felt I could knit Carmel back to life. Not the way they were before, something lumpy and misshapen — but so there’s a whole again. The tiny actions I’d been trying to make my mantra — sweep, bathe, pick up off the floor, drink, eat, straighten up that rumpled bed, dress the wound. Lucy took the coat from my shoulders and helped me into the bath. Even though I knew it was cool, and no steam rose from its surface, it burned against my skin.

‘We’ll wash your hair,’ she said and got the showerhead running and started sluicing water over my scalp. Sand flowed out of my hair into the bath and once a tiny snail creature plopped out. She lathered up my hair with shampoo and rescued the snail from the soapy water and popped it onto the tiles, where it stuck fast like a piece of bubblegum.

‘Lucy, this is so very kind of you.’ I started to cry.

‘There, there,’ she soothed, her deft fingers removing a tiny pebble from my scalp.

Paul hovered outside, not looking in. ‘I’ll make us something warm to drink.’

Lucy’s tiny clothes were too small for me so she dressed me in Paul’s — chinos and a fleece. I buried my face into the soft sleeve and breathed in the chemical flower scent again.

Then I was on her leather sofa, with one on either side.

‘Paul.’ I needed to ask this. ‘Do you feel she’s still alive?’

‘Yes.’ His answer surprised me; it was so vehement it made him spill his tea on his legs.

‘How?’

‘I just feel it deep inside me, Beth. Don’t you?’

No, I wanted to answer. All I feel is a big fat gaping mystery. A yawning vortex churning with coloured clues: crayons; red shoes; men on trains; the glittering skirt of a storyteller. They whirl around me day and night. It’s a hole I stand on the edge of, always nearly falling in.