The Girl in the Red Coat

4

I like playing in the garden on my own, making dinners. There’s a tree at the bottom with twigs that if you skin off the bark looks just like chicken, white and flaky. So with twig knives and forks I can put out dinner. There’s old leaves though — black and slimy left over from ages ago — so I kick them away to make a gap on the grass.

I’m super safe here. Around the garden there’s a stone wall and I can only just about see over the top. Over the wall there’s fields and hardly any houses. But I can see smoke from chimneys puffing far away. There’s a long way I can see as Mum says Norfolk is flat like a pancake.

As I’m playing I see two big white birds flying side by side. One’s a bit in front of the other like he’s the leader. Their necks are stuck right out and they’re flying low down, wings flapping away like it’s hard for them to stay up. I climb onto the bottom of the wall to see better and, guess what? They fly right over my head and I have to laugh at their big tummies wobbling in the air and their orange legs dangling down flappy and useless.

But that’s when I turn round and see Mum’s face at the window. Oh, she tries to go back but it’s too late. I’ve caught her checking I’m still there, like she does since the maze. Then she comes out of the back door with her coat on like it’s nothing at all and I never caught her. She smiles the sort of smile people do when they want you to stop being grumpy.

‘What was funny, Carmel?’

‘What was funny, what was funny, Carmel?’ I mutter under my breath but so she can’t hear. But I feel bad because her smile looks a bit broken. Anyway I want to tell her about the birds.

‘Geese,’ she says.

‘Like snow geese or like goose that Alison had for Christmas dinner?’

‘Yes, both. They mate for life. That would be a male and a female you saw.’

I have to ask as I’m not sure. ‘Mate for life …?’

‘Yes, they stay together forever like they’re married.’

So not like you and Dad then. I don’t say that of course, even though she’s annoying me again, crouching down and pretending to play with my leaf plates because she doesn’t want to go back inside and leave me alone. She fiddles around with the twigs I’ve put down for knives and forks, making them all untidy. One of her brown boots stands on a plate and crushes it though she probably can’t realise and thinks it’s just a leaf.

I sigh and kneel down and straighten it up again as best I can. But now she says, ‘Carmel, you’re getting your trousers wet.’ And she starts stroking my hair and her hand feels very heavy on my head and I’m wishing she’d stop though I don’t say. I just carry on putting bits of chicken back onto plates and waiting for her to go away.

She goes in the end but now I feel mean because perhaps she just thought she was being nice playing with me. Being mean goes right into my stomach, sick and uncomfortable, like I’ve swallowed a stone. After the maze I’ve been feeling mean a lot. Last week we went to McDonald’s. I was so excited because we were taking Sara. Sara’s mum smells nice and so does their house and her mum wears the most gorgeous shoes with gold bits on them. We were in McDonald’s and me and Sara were laughing together about a silly secret but Mum’s there watching and listening. Oh, she was pretending not to but she kept looking at me without turning her head, just out the corner of her eyes like a spy. And then I had such a mean thought it made the McFlurry I’d just had go all hard in my stomach. It was — I wish Sara’s mum was my mum and I was Sara’s sister and we could all live together in their little warm house in town and maybe I could have some peace.

After we’d taken Sara home and we were on the way back on the bus to our house I was still feeling horrible. I was thinking maybe she wasn’t spying like I thought at all, maybe I’d just wanted it to be me on my own with Sara — more grown-up like, so I said, ‘I wish I could buy you some gold shoes.’

Mum turned and smiled a lovely smile.

‘What a nice thought, Carmel, but where would I wear them? To Tesco’s?’ And she laughed. ‘Tell you what, we could both have gold shoes and we could just wear them for shopping.’

I started laughing too at the thought of us trying to walk round Tesco’s in high-heeled gold shoes, tottering behind the trolley. Then I looked down at her feet on the bus floor. She was wearing her big brown boots she’s worn for so long there’s toe shapes in the leather. I remembered she has quite big feet with lumpy toes and I imagined seeing her there on the bus with her feet squeezed into tiny gold shoes like Sara’s mum wears and it made me feel a bit sad. So I looked out of the window so she couldn’t see my face.