The Girl in the Red Coat

8

Great flapping lines of flags are blowing upwards at the festival to the blue sky. While we’re queuing a woman dressed as a dragon walks up and down on stilts.

‘How do they walk?’ I ask my mum. ‘Can I have some stilts?’

I can imagine myself walking round the garden in them and being able to see right over the wall. Though I don’t tell Mum that bit.

‘They strap their legs up and have to practise a lot,’ Mum says.

The dragon goes past again, she looks down at me, and against the sun her golden face turns dark. She drapes her frilly dragon wings over me and I tip my head back so they can fall over my face and everything goes green and gold, then black. She walks on and I can see her bottom moving under her shiny tight green leggings. When a man dressed as a fly comes near I swap sides with Mum, in case he does the same, because I don’t really like the fly.

When we pay and get through Mum leans over me. ‘What d’you think?’

And I’m just nodding and nodding because I can’t say what I think except I love it. I love how everything seems weird, or too tall or upside down. That there’s people with sequins on their eyelids or dressed as bears and a giant book open on a page with the corner curling up — though when I touch it with my finger, it’s not paper but hard plastic. It’s like the place in Alice on the other side of the mirror, a place where I might be able to grow as high as one of the tents or talk to a cat. Mum’s explaining how in each tent there’s stories being told and when she says that I can feel words come shooting out of the tent doors and I just want to stand there at the openings and let them fizz on my brain.

Mum’s reading the book now that tells you everything that’s going to be happening. The programme she says it is, though I thought that was something on the telly.

‘What kind of story would you like to hear?’

I say fairies because I can’t put into proper words the things in my head: swords glinting in the dark; pirates with hard yellow eyes; things that happen under the sea; creatures with furry mouths that whisper secrets.

We find a tent called ‘Once Upon a Time’. Inside, there’s a pretty woman with silver glitter on her face and little pink wings drooping down her sides. The tent’s lit up with coloured lights that twinkle on and off. When everyone’s sitting cross-legged on the mat on the ground she reads this story about a fairy that has to earn her wings by doing good deeds. But all the time she’s reading out loud it’s like she’s trying too hard and it’s making her worry. Her forehead keeps crinkling up and when she puts on the voice of the fairy it’s high and squeaky and her wings start looking sadder and sadder. And as well the fairy’s just too good to be true, especially when she swears never to let a bad thought cross her mind ever again. Bad thoughts happen in everyone’s mind — I know I’ve got them. So when the story finishes I start pulling on the sleeve of Mum’s green jacket.

‘Did you like that?’ she asks.

‘Yes, it was lovely.’ I don’t want to say about the sad wings or the too-good-to-be-true fairy. ‘Can we go somewhere else now?’

We find another tent where a story’s going to start in half an hour.

‘Let’s bag a place,’ says Mum and because hardly anyone’s there yet we can be right at the front. I sit on the floor mat under the wooden stage and the empty chair that’s ready for the storyteller.

Mum’s looking at the programme again. ‘You’ll like this one, Carmel. It’s a real writer and she’s going to be reading a story she wrote herself.’

The tent’s soon full to bursting, even people standing at the back.

I look over my shoulder and it’s then I see the man.

He’s standing against the wall — if you can call it a wall as we’re in a tent — he’s got white hair and glasses and he looks just like my storyteller in the drawing. And I smile at him because he looks like that and he smiles back. He’s staring right at me.

The writer comes in from a gap in the tent behind the stage. She’s old with short spiky grey hair and she’s got on this long glittery pink skirt with little blue boots poking out from underneath and her dangly earrings are the shape of question marks. She’s got a basket too. It’s a long time before she settles in the chair. She takes a big blob of pink bubblegum right out of her mouth and glues it onto a piece of paper in her basket. In the basket there’s books and her knitting showing out of the top with the needles stuck into a ball of red wool. I’m getting the feeling she’s been knitting right up until it was time to start the story and then afterwards she’ll go straight back to it.

The first words of the story are: ‘The day her dad left Cassandra was so upset she went out into the garden and buried her favourite doll …’

I listen and listen because it seems to me that the girl in the story is just like me. I can feel Mum looking at me sometimes but I don’t let that take my listening away. The story finishes and the writer looks right over her red glasses and says, ‘Would you like to ask me any questions?’

There’s quiet for a bit then a woman at the back puts her hand up and asks, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Though I can tell she only asks this because the quiet is embarrassing and she’s filling it up so it won’t be so bad for the writer. But the writer answers anyway. Her ideas, she says, come drifting towards her, and she’s got no way of knowing where they came from. They just come floating right towards her like out of a fog. It’s not much of an explanation but I can tell she’s telling the truth as best she can.

Other children start asking questions. ‘Why did you call the girl Cassandra?’ and ‘What happened to the dog that was in the beginning of the story and not the end?’ This question makes the writer smile and she says the dog was there through the whole story but she’s only written about him at the start and maybe that was a mistake. That’s very interesting to me, because I never thought you could make mistakes in stories. She starts saying things about who you can talk to if you are upset like Cassandra — teachers, friends and of course there’s always your nan and grandad.

That’s when I put my hand up.

She points to me straight away — like I knew she was going to, because all the way through I can tell she’s been interested in me. She kept looking over at me when she was reading and finally I think I have something quite interesting and unusual to tell her.

‘I don’t know any of my grandparents at all.’

She’s smiling and leaning forward, she is interested.

‘Why, dear?’

‘Because my dad’s parents are dead and my mum hasn’t spoken to hers since I was a baby.’

Mum pulls her arms in the green jacket round and hugs her knees.

But the writer understands, she leans forward even more and says, ‘How fascinating! I just knew you’d have something out of the ordinary to tell me.’

My question seems to finish everything and people start leaving.

‘Did you like that?’ Mum asks. But I just nod; I can’t really say anything after speaking like that in front of everyone.

‘Let’s go and have a bite to eat then, Carmel. You must be getting hungry. I know I am.’

And I’m grateful to her because I know she probably wants to ask if I felt like the girl in the story when Dad left, and I did, but I don’t feel like talking about it.

We buy hot dogs and eat them sitting on the grass on top of a little hill so we can see everything below: the tents; the big book; the crowds with the people on stilts standing up taller than anyone else. We chew for a bit then I look down again.

‘What’s that?’ I ask. There’s smoke on the ground and the people are sticking up out of it with their legs invisible.

‘Seems like there’s a sea mist coming.’

‘Oh, I thought there was a fire.’

‘No, just a bit of old fog and look, it hasn’t reached us here.’ She laughs and her blue eyes light up all bright.

I put the last bit of hot dog in my mouth and squish it with my teeth. I decide I like the mist. It makes everything seem even stranger than before and I like that.

‘I love it here,’ I say, because I do and the feeling of it has suddenly rushed through my body.

‘Do you, honey?’ Mum’s finished her hot dog and she’s sitting with her face turned up to the sun. ‘I do too.’ And she looks happier and prettier than I’ve seen her for ages.

But then she turns into a spy again.