The Girl in the Red Coat

46

FIVE YEARS, 105 DAYS

At night, on the ward, people became lumps under thin hospital blankets.

Night in the hospital was another world. A netherworld: the dim lights, burning through the night; the squeak of doctors’ shoes on disinfected floors; the tense crisis of health where staff and patients diced with death; the coughing heard down the corridor; the stirrings in the sleep; the sudden bursts of giggling by the nurses’ station.

I preferred the nights. I felt better in an environment that said: normality is eggshell thin. Peer round the corner of it and there is this — just out of view.

All my searching had not found Carmel, instead it had brought me here; and I’d gained a reputation for being capable, calm, professional. When I thought of her now it was as a glittering needle: this great wide world and she one tiny point in it.

Twice I thought I’d seen her in the hospital out of the corner of my eye.

Once, standing by the bed of a gravely sick child. Her head was bent down and was sombrely looking into his face, her fingers in the pockets of her red coat. The other time, down the end of a corridor, holding her hand up in a kind of greeting, or farewell.

But most times she was the absent sort of ghost: a cut-out hole in the air.

At first I thought my studies could answer some question about the human puzzle and how we came to be and how we fit together … living protoplasm is created from other pre-existing living protoplasm … Instead what was there was another baby. Paul came to find me the night Lucy was brought in for her second labour.

‘She’ll be quick,’ he said. ‘Well, last time was.’ His eyes were shiny bright.

Though, unusually, her second labour was protracted. I forced myself to focus, filling in charts, ready for the doctor’s rounds in the morning. Every time the nurses’ station phone rang I pounced on it.

Light was tingeing the windows by the time he came to find me again.

‘She had a hard time,’ he said. Black circles were daubed under each eye. ‘Beth, it’s a girl. A little girl.’

‘A girl,’ I repeated dumbly. He reached out his arms for me and over his shoulder I focused on the drugs trolley that it was my responsibility to wheel round that night — the red and blue plastic tops ranked in rows. I felt the air being sucked from the building, as if it might be a bomb wrapped in a blanket and tucked inside the see-through plastic cot upstairs in the maternity ward.

‘A girl,’ I said again and we both clung to each other then, wetting each other’s neck with tears, though whether it was joy or grief was hard to know, the two streamed together.

‘Come and see her.’

I shook my head and grabbed onto the handle of the drugs trolley. ‘Lucy will need to rest.’

‘Just for a minute, please. It’s better you do this right away. I want everything to be right, Beth. I can’t have anything holding over her, she’s just a baby.’

The wicked witch arriving at the christening, I thought, the one that leaves a curse on the girl child: that’s what they’re afraid of — deep down, underneath. They want to make sure it’s a blessing I leave.

Lucy gave me an exhausted smile and held out the baby in her arms, pink and sleeping. ‘Meet Flora,’ she said, as I took the living warmth into my hands.

‘Hello Flora,’ I whispered to her, and of course it was not a bomb but another warm baby, tired out from being born. ‘Bless you, bless you,’ I said.

When they left I waved to the three of them from the front steps and turned back inside — back to all the actions, the tiny actions: the drink of water held to the lips in the middle of the night; the smoothing out of bed sheets; the whisking away of the bedpan for dignity and hygiene.

Driving home, the green dawn over the sky and the house, half expectant she could be in the back seat, coming home. Is she back yet? No, no, not this time. Then when? I chucked my keys in the copper bowl by the door and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Hair: cut short and bobbed, suitable for a nurse. My face: thinner than before. With the money I now earned I’d spruced up the house, bought paint and made the walls downstairs glow warm melon yellow. She’ll love this colour.

Up in Carmel’s room I added Flora to her map in bright pink. Jack, Flora, Graham — all new — and I sensed how our maps were splitting, diverging, forming and reforming as people and places came crowding in.

I looked round her room, remembering my own room at my mother’s. Every night, going to bed, I paused at the top of the stairs outside. Mostly the door stayed shut, but there were moments when I slipped inside to look at her folded T-shirts, her drawings, her books and her duvet, and touch them gently. I would fold the tissue paper back and look at the unworn red shoes. While I had them, she couldn’t walk away from me completely.