The Girl in the Red Coat

38

ONE YEAR, 43 DAYS

Alice had faded from my life. When I saw her again I realised how long it had been. We’d often bumped into each other before; this was small-town life. Then it occurred to me she could have been avoiding me all this time — jumping up side alleys at the sight of me.

The farmers’ market: the hall blowsy with sunshine, the smell of apple juice sharp in the air. And there she was, darting around, with a basket on her arm. Her busy little figure in a short purple cloak seemed to form and reform around the vast echoing room. Just the sort of silly thing she’d wear, I thought. But I didn’t exactly feel the same fury on seeing her again. More an electrical memory of it, a shower of sparks as a live cable falls.

Then she was close, picking up essential oils, sniffing at the sample bottles. I went right up.

‘Alice.’

She nearly dropped the blue bottle when she turned.

‘Beth.’ Her eyes started sliding, looking for escape.

Then it did hit me, a wave of rage. She saw it in my face and her mouth primped up like pastry and I saw a certain stubbornness there, a belief that she knew the truth, even if others wished to ignore it. ‘I’m sorry, Beth, you didn’t like what I said to you, I was just trying to tell you what happened. It’s not only me that thought it, the people at the church did too. I have to go now …’

‘What? What are you talking about? You’d better tell me — now.’

*

She sat across the table from me; an unlikely setting for this conversation: the teashop with its sprigged tablecloths, the whitewashed walls bowed with age. Careful polite chatter from other tables.

‘I did try and explain to you before, Beth.’ She twirled the herb teabag around her cup and plonked it on her saucer, leaving it there to leak green stuff.

‘But I didn’t know you’d actually taken her to church. Christ, Alice.’ We were keeping our voices down but people were starting to look.

‘Yes, you did.’ She sipped and made a face. ‘I told you.’

She was right, I remembered now. It wasn’t long after the split. I’d left the house for the weekend so Paul could return and pack the remainder of his things and spend some time with Carmel without an atmosphere. When I came back I was slightly irritated to find out that Alice had been there. It felt like she’d come as soon as she got wind that Paul was on his own. ‘How are you coping?’ she’d asked. ‘Left all on your own, you poor thing, let me take Carmel out, give you some time.’ Like he was incapable of looking after his own daughter, but he, busy and distracted, had said, ‘Oh alright.’ Later Carmel told me Alice had taken her to church and I was annoyed at that too because we hadn’t been asked. But Carmel smiled when she talked about going, and I thought, well, most experiences can be worthwhile, then it got forgotten in amongst everything else.

‘Alright, but I didn’t know it wasn’t a normal sort of service. Not the usual.’ I was trying to even out my voice now, so as not to startle her. I needed to pick every fact clean.

‘Yes, Beth, it was a healing service.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing, nothing happened. I just wanted her to be there, to witness what was going on. She went up the front to sit and I can still see her there, watching, with beautiful lilies behind her. Then afterwards she said she’d felt a humming in her hands. I wanted to tell you before, you know. But you were so angry.’ She shivered slightly.

How dare you, I thought, taking my daughter places without my permission, but I kept my voice soft. ‘So who were you talking about earlier? You said “other people thought so too”. Who did you mean, Alice?’

‘Oh,’ a smile broke on her face. ‘He was a lovely man. He said Carmel looked full of light and we chatted about her …’

‘Chatted?’

She was starting to relax, tell her story. ‘Yes. Handsome, too, for an older man. You know, charismatic, that type. The most amazing blue eyes. I can’t remember really what we talked about, Carmel, yes, and … I told him about the time I took my mother to Lourdes, he was really interested in that.’ I realised then that she was attracted to anyone who was vaguely nice to her.

Something went off in my head. A watery light seemed to run down the walls for a moment. Then everything clear, bright like it had been painted; the flowers a box of jewels on the table.

‘What else did you tell him? What did he want to know, Alice?’

She stopped, startled, and looked at me.

‘Honestly, I really don’t remember. It was nothing …’

Her smile had started slipping over her face again. Her wrists arched to lift her cup in both hands and my eye caught on those bracelets. I can see them now. So unusual — leather, fastened with a popper and a saddle of plaited multicoloured silks — an identical one on each wrist, covering something up … My heart unexpectedly turned over for her, for us all, how could I never have fathomed it before? They’d just seemed part of the rest of her: the crystals and the dreamcatchers; her talk of spirituality; conversing with the universe; kabbalah — at least my parents’ religion had a heft to it, it never wavered.

Blood of Christ, I closed my eyes and a red wave of it engulfed me.

‘Alice, am I a bad person?’

‘Beth, I don’t know … I don’t know what you mean.’

‘To have deserved this.’

I opened my eyes. She was pale and quiet now. ‘You do realise,’ I said, ‘we’re going to have to go to the police with this.’

*

Alice was interviewed along with the people who ran the church. Alice didn’t know much beyond what he looked like; she’d done most of the talking.

They were a motley crew, Maria, the liaison officer, told me, that ran the church: old ladies with long floating scarves and bottles of holy water in their pockets. There’d been a lot of strangers there the day Carmel went, they said, but then there often were, their little church was so popular and quite well known ‘on the circuit’. ‘Yes, there was a man, that’s right.’ Oh, but they were sure he wouldn’t have meant any harm, not in their church. He’d got there early. ‘Mary, didn’t you speak to him?’ ‘Yes, that’s right. I think he was from away, not sure from where. He did tell me his name, but for the life of me, for the life of me … So long, dear. Memory not what it used to be, and after all no harm, not in our church, couldn’t be. All good you see. That’s what we deal in here, all good …’

*

I lay in bed pondering it all, remembering the light running like water down the walls when Alice told me. It’s the movie of her life, I thought, that’s the reason it knocked me sideways like that — unseen footage. Like the clown’s face you imagined she might have seen that day at the circus, floating high up between the flaps of the tent. It’s the film curled up in a canister that’s never been played.

I saw us then, almost as in a vision, as if we’d never escaped the maze that day but were still stuck there. Me and her separated by walls of yew and only from above can it be seen how close we are.

‘We’ll pray,’ the old ladies told Maria as she left, smiling their ingratiating false teeth smiles, willing her away so they could go back to their arranging of flowers, their moving on arthritic legs around the church to tidy the chairs back into neat rows. Back to their magic spells. ‘We’ll pray for the little girl, what was her name again?’

Carmel’s map was yellowing now on her bedroom wall, the corners beginning to curl. There’d been no new additions for a long time. I drew a careful line from Alice’s name then marked in Church women, the letters tall and skinny like I imagined the women to be.

Then another line which ended in a question mark.