The Girl in the Red Coat

37

Dearest daughter,

The letter came this morning; Gramps has already opened it. Dad’s written it on his computer.

I am not able to come and get you. Lucy and myself are due to wed. I’m so pleased that your grandfather and Dorothy have agreed to look after you. You could not be in better hands. Be a good girl for them …

There wasn’t anything from Sara. I expect she’ll have a new best friend now, probably Scarlet. I scrunch the letter up and go away from the camp without telling anyone. I climb a tree with no leaves and sit there on my own.

This place they call ‘The South’: it’s the strangest place I’ve ever been. Clouds gather black and sudden when the sky’s bright blue. Ropes of plants hang nearly to the ground from trees. Where we’re camped is full of sand and dust. I can’t understand why it’s so hot here and it was cold before. That it was winter there and not here. I can’t understand anything. At night it’s so hot we don’t sleep with any blankets. Sometimes on Sundays we go to churches where people sway and shout. Other times Gramps does his own church in the truck and gets us to kneel while he reads from the Bible. I think he likes it better that way.

Gramps says there’s God all around us. Is that true? I thought I saw him once from the corner of my eye, but it was just Gramps’s shadow on the ground. I look up into the sky and wish and wish God was there. I know I should think it’s true. Am I naughty if I don’t? I hold my hands up like I could stick my fingers straight into heaven and touch God’s feet to check he’s there.

I say to the sky, ‘Who are you? Who are you? Show me that you’re true. If something happens now, I’ll believe, I promise.’ There’s a long time, but nothing happens. Insects squeak and I’m there under the hot blue sky waiting. In the sand down below Carmel is written in loops like a snake put it there.

Gramps says I’m an angel. Am I? Do angels sit in bare old trees like this? Mum used to call me that too, but she meant a different thing. When he says it, it scares me. I’m not, though. I’m not an angel. I’m a human being. My name is Carmel and I’m a human being. There’s nothing else. God doesn’t look down at you from the sky, checking you’re alright. Dad doesn’t either.

Dorothy comes to find me and walks right into the C and the a, messing it up. She doesn’t even know she’s standing on my name. She looks up to find me and I swing my patent shoe till it covers her face and pretend I’m stamping on it.

‘There you are,’ she says. ‘We were worried about you. We thought you’d disappeared.’

*

Gramps is going to a healing. He’s taking me.

‘Do I have to go?’ I ask. It’ll be like before with the twig boy; I bet he’s not even alive any more, that boy. He was so weak, I felt it when my hands were on his bony head. His life was a torch when the batteries are about to run out.

But it’s all arranged. Gramps is in his best white shirt and his black suit, and the Bible with glitteriest gold writing tucked under his arm. He blocks out the sun while he tells me I have to come.

Then we’re holding hands and walking just the two of us. I can’t choose. Choices, they all belong to Gramps and Dorothy. They keep them in their pockets. The sky is blue, blue, blue and my feet make small marks on the dusty road next to Gramps’s big ones. His prints look tangled because of his limp.

We come to a house. It’s made of wood and trees are grown up around it and they flop their branches onto the roof like they’ve grown too much and they’re tired now and need a rest. The grass on each side of the path is so high it’s up to my head with insects that croak and buzz so loud my bones buzz with them. If I walked into the grass, even right at the edge, it would be solid with their bodies. They’d bite away at me so fast in five minutes I’d be a pile of white bones. Above us the trees make noises moving in the wind. Somewhere there’s a stream. This place is full of noise. There’s no cars, except a broken blue one rusting by the house, but it’s louder here than standing in the middle of a road.

Gramps knocks at the door. His knocking makes a big peel of pink paint float down to the ground. There’s no answer for a long time. Then a woman in an apron opens the door a little crack and stares with one eye pointing at us through the gap.

‘What you want?’

Gramps coughs. ‘It’s Father Patron here. We’ve got an appointment.’

She opens the door wider and calls over her shoulder. ‘Celia, preacher’s here.’

Now there’s more light on her I see she’s black. Her apron has a top to it and there’s a pattern of red and green apples all over.

I hear coughing inside the house. Then a big thick wind of illness blows through the open door and right over us. I get it in my nose, so strong it nearly makes me fall over. It’s the smell of lamb’s blood. Gramps can’t smell anything, he’s nodding and smiling at the woman. It scares me to look into the house where the smell is coming from, so I stay on the step. But Gramps is halfway in already. ‘Come on, come in now,’ he says.

I look back to where the biting insects are and force myself over the step into the house. I walk behind them and the dark in the hallway turns their heads into black shapes.

‘… name of Mercy,’ I hear Gramps say, his head bending down to talk to the woman in the apron. My throat goes tight and ‘Carmel’ sticks there this time.

We don’t go upstairs but all the same we’re in a bedroom now, at the back of the house. Against the back wall, in the bed, is a lump covered up by pink blankets. There’s a chest of drawers with a wood cross hanging over it from a nail. The blinds are closed in here and the sun comes through them in stripes. One of the insects has got in and is sitting on the blind sunning itself. It feels like hardly anyone comes into this room. That the lump in the bed gets left on its own a lot. I think I’d rather be outside, even with the biting insects, and I go for the door. But Gramps is there first. He slams it shut and puts his hand on the back of my neck and pushes me into the room.

‘Celie, they’re here,’ says the apple-apron lady.

The lump moves and groans.

‘C’mon Celie. I don’t be having all day.’ The apple-apron lady sounds tired.

Then a big brown eye pops out from under the blankets. Then a hand. The hand pulls down the covers and there’s wild eyes.

‘Oh Gramps, no,’ I whisper.

‘Shush, child,’ he says back. ‘She’s afflicted.’

Gramps crosses the room, his black lace-up shoes clicking on the wooden boards. He uses my neck to take me with him. He sits on the wooden chair next to the bed, holding onto his Bible.

‘Not today,’ the lump mutters.

‘Yes, today, dear. You have to take advantage, you know, when there’s the holy spirit. You have to welcome it in and say, “Yes, today.”’

He puts the Bible down on the bed and with his spare hand he reaches out and tries to move the blankets away but the lump grabs them tighter.

‘If I let you go, Carmel, will you promise to stay where you are?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘No.’

‘Child don’t want to be healing?’ the apple-apron lady asks.

Gramps does his big flashy smile. ‘Sure she does. Just gets overwhelmed by spirit is all.’

He decides it’s safe to let go of me. I stay in the room but I step back from the lump’s bed.

‘’Course we know it’s a disease of spirit she has. But what does doctor say?’ Gramps asks the lady.

She pinches her lips together. ‘Multiple sclerosis.’

‘She young for that.’ Gramps has started talking like the apple-apron lady.

‘Yeah, she young. Going to her mind now too.’

‘That shows how deep the spiritual malaise has descended.’

The lady shakes her head and wipes her eyes on the apples. ‘Poor Celie.’

‘Do you think you could get her out of these blankets?’

The person in the bed shakes her head — I can see the top of it with hair jumping out thick and black. She pulls her blankets right to her face.

‘Come on girl.’ I wonder if the lady is her mum. It’s hard to tell how old the lump is. Sometimes she looks like an old lady and sometimes like she could be my age. The lady puts her thin arms round Celie and tries to pull to make her sit up properly.

‘Now then, Celie, maybe you could be helping me out a little.’

I feel: she’s fed up of doing this. She’s fed up of looking after this lump in the bed and she wants it all to be over. So she can go and sit on the broken swing on the porch and drink tea. So she can smoke a cigarette and watch the smoke dance away through the trees and not have to think anything except there’s nothing to do or worry about any more.

I see it all and she looks at me sharp, like she’s seen me see.

Somehow, she gets the person up and it’s a big girl, not an old lady. Her lips are cracked up and when the blanket comes away her body’s thin and bony and pointing in strange directions like it’s trying to make itself into a puzzle. I remember Melody turning into a doll.

‘This happens,’ says the apron lady. “Spasticity”, the doctors term it.’

Celie’s hand comes out again and I see it properly this time and her skin looks so ill at first I think she’s wearing a wrinkly purple-black glove. The blankets are down now and Celie’s got on a baby-blue nightie with frills everywhere. I can see how her body hurts her. In her big round eyes she’s frightened like an animal is — not understanding anything. I feel bad, then, for thinking of her as just a lump in the bed.

Gramps opens his Bible but he puts his hand flat on the page and uses his own words: ‘This is a call, a call on You, Lord, for healing this afflicted soul …’

He goes on and on till my ears fade him out and the insect buzzing at the window fills me up, louder than Gramps. So loud the room buzzes with it, then I am too, like me and the insect are the same thing, and I want to shake out my wings or rub the back of my neck with my legs.

Gramps is asking the spirit to enter the girl. He looks up at the ceiling at the dusty fan that’s going round and round. For a second, I think it’s funny, like he’s talking to the fan and asking it for the spirit.

Gramps tells me to sit on the bed and it gives a creak and I can feel the buzzing going through that, too.

There’s something in the room with us. It’s soft and jellyish, you can’t see it but it moves around us making sparkles in the air. I’m scared now, it’s like ghosts are here with us. If I sit still, maybe they’ll go away.

‘Our hands will be the instruments …’ Gramps is talking quietly.

He puts his hands on Celie’s head, on her thick black hair, and my palms start itching.

‘Do the same as I do, child.’ He’s giving me instructions like a teacher. ‘Do exactly the same as I do.’

I kneel on the bed and do the same because I have the feeling real strong to try and help her. And it’s not being a zombie this time. I really want to. I try to be gentle — it looks like her face and head get hurt easily. My hands go under his so I’m holding her ears and I can feel them curly in my hands. Everything hums and buzzes hard then, the insect shakes its wings in time. Me, the bed, Celie, the light — all hum with it. The ghosts fly through me. It feels like I’m going to get thrown off the bed so I hold on tight to her ears and close my eyes.

Then the lights. They seem to be in her body, ropes of them inside her, and as I reach towards them they jump up and get brighter. I make them flare like fireworks. The buzzing’s calmed down now, not drilling in my head, but long and low, and it’s making us stick like two magnets.

I don’t know how long we’re there.

All of a sudden I get unstuck from her. The room’s gone quiet. The apple-apron lady opens up a window and I can hear birds singing from outside. My hands on Celie’s head are wet. There’s sweat over her face and head and her blue nightie’s wet too.

I open my eyes properly and look into hers. They’re clear brown marbles. She smiles at me and I don’t feel afraid of her any more. She was a girl like me all along. I feel light and quick like I could fly up to the ceiling and talk to everyone from there.

‘Take your hands away now, child,’ says Gramps. They’ve gone stiff but I move them anyway.

Celie blinks. She reaches over and lifts a glass of water from the table next to the bed and drinks it down in one go. We all watch her as she does this. She pushes the blankets off her bottom half so we can see her brown feet sticking up. She puts both hands on her head and smoothes down her hair. Then she lifts her legs up and swings them over so her feet are on the rug on the floor.

‘Oh my Lord, I never see anything like it in all my born days. That child has cured her. Celie has been cured, so God is my witness,’ shouts the lady in the apron. She falls down to the floor and kneels there in the middle of the room with both her hands together, holding them up. She rocks on her knees, saying, ‘Praise be, praise be, praise be …’ over and over again.

*

I have trouble walking back I’m so tired. Gramps stops off at a shop by the side of the road and buys Dorothy a bag of groceries and a new stove. It’s got a bottle of gas that makes it work and he carries it on his shoulder like it doesn’t weigh anything. His face is the most pleased I’ve ever seen it, he’s smiling and looks super super strong and he’s ignoring his limp so much he can walk almost properly.

Dorothy takes the groceries out of the orange net bag and groans with happiness. There’s fruit, swollen up, green, purple, yellow. A bottle of something brown. A box of candy, double-decker, in pink cardboard. Dorothy’s fingers squeeze the fruit and touch the blue shiny knobs on her new cooker with love.

Silver holds out the candy to me. Her lips are already shiny chocolate brown but I don’t want any.

‘You look real white, Carmel,’ she says. ‘You look like you’re going to throw up. Are you going to throw up?’

I shake my head and then even though I’m sitting down on the steps my eyelids start to close and Mercy is behind them. Her head, stamp size, looking at me — twice over because she’s behind each eyelid. Her face wants to tell me something, but she can’t speak.

*

The next day Gramps’s phone rings; he walks away from us to talk into it. After: ‘The doctors have seen her and they are amazed,’ he tells Dorothy.

Dorothy sits on the stripy camp chair. ‘What did they say?’

‘They say they can’t believe it. Though men of science are generally unbelievers, that is well known. But they say the evidence is before their eyes.’

Dorothy’s tapping her nose. ‘So it’s confirmed? There is a confirmation?’

He nods.

‘Medical confirmation?’

‘Yes, yes, I told you. They say they don’t believe it was the child, that something else must be at play. But they can’t explain what, they can’t explain because they are faithless.’

Tap, tap, tap. ‘This is all for the good, this confirmation. Forgive me, Dennis, but I couldn’t be sure before, not truly in my heart. But we can make good now, it’ll be easier now that we know for ourselves the truth of the matter. Carmel …’ she calls out to me, ‘you must be a very obedient girl for us from now on. No more waywardness. Think of our house, the one we could have, and three ponies, one for each of you.’

I don’t know what she means so I keep quiet. I keep looking at my hands, though in amazement now I’ve felt what they can do. I sniff at them to see if they smell different and even lick my palm but there’s just salt. It’s the same as the time with Melody — there’s still shocks in them. Before that, too, when I was little, except I didn’t know what it was then.

Only it’s not what Dorothy says about doctors and it’s not Gramps that’s shown me. It was Celie.

*

Some people come and throw stones at the truck.

‘They think we’re chancers, itinerants,’ says Dorothy — same as she said before. ‘You’ll have to get us into a proper park.’

Then us children see a man taking photos of us. We decide not to tell, that it’s our secret. We make up stories about him. I say he’s a spy, Melody says he’s the devil and Silver says he looks like a rat’s ass. That makes us laugh so hard we roll round on the ground.

We cut ourselves with a knife sneaked from Dorothy and swear never to tell and drip our blood into each other.

‘Now we’re sisters,’ says Melody.

I feel warm all over when she says that. ‘Honest? What d’you say, Silver?’

‘I guess.’ She doesn’t sound sure but she wipes the knife on her knickers and then holds my hand. We run back laughing and put the knife back.

But Dorothy says she knows about the man with the camera anyway — she’s seen him too. Then the people with stones come again and us children are so scared we hide under the bunk beds. While I’m lying there squashed I have a daydream about Nico coming to rescue me. Later, we creep out and there’s dents in the side of the truck where the stones landed. So Gramps drives us off to a park. He says it’s better anyway because he’s made a contact nearby.