The Girl in the Red Coat

9

DAY 1

How many times have I gone over what happened next? How many times more? Fated for it to run and run, a tape that as soon as it ends rewinds back to the beginning to start again.

After lunch it got busier — the prospect of a children’s storytelling festival a magnetic draw for parents of bored holiday kids. The lovely weather of the morning that had lured so many people on a day out was changing. The sun kept trying to break through but the cold mist poked its fingers into us, so we kept our coats on. I felt the first pricklings of a panic attack — something I imagined I’d left behind — but Carmel was still excited, buoyed up with being somewhere new and the ancient magic generated by the stories. We walked among mothers pushing buggies and families studying their programmes and the people in costumes handing out leaflets or free bottles of water. At first I just kept glancing down to check for the flash of red beside me.

It became noisier. There were bangs and smoke from firecrackers being let off, the smoke mingling with the creeping mist. Cheers as a mass of yellow balloons was let off and careened across the sky like a crazy wayward double of the sun dislodged from its mooring. Smoke from burning burgers infiltrated its meaty smell into pockets of the crowd. Thoughts of the school trip started coming back to me, where the teachers had lost her. The maze where she’d disappeared.

So I held onto her hand but it felt slippy, always at the point of breaking loose, so sometimes all I had was a finger or two. Don’t fuss, I told myself, just make sure she’s next to you. She wants to be a big girl now. But I looked for that flash of red and it was gone, replaced by a fat woman who didn’t seem to feel the cold, the jellied weight of her arms hanging down beneath the short sleeves of her pink T-shirt, silver stars bursting across her breasts. She leaned down and stabbed a shiny blue helium balloon on a stick inside a pushchair. ‘Here,’ she grimaced. ‘Now shut up.’ Then the red of Carmel’s coat appeared and I could breathe again. I reached for her hand, feeling just thin air and this time a man in a Fair Isle jumper, carrying a little girl in pink boots on his shoulders, had come between us. ‘Can you see the bear?’ he called upwards. ‘Can you see the bear?’ Then some leaflets were thrust at me and there was Carmel again and I dropped the leaflets onto the churned-up ground and found her hand and held it tight, so I couldn’t lose it. Then the air began to get more and more lacy with fog.

‘Just keep hold of my hand,’ I shouted down.

My resolve on the train, how quickly it had been dismantled. And everything, I know, would have been forgotten if that day hadn’t been preserved forever, my panic a brick in the building that was made, hour by hour, of events — standing there for all time instead of crumbling away into memory. I didn’t mean to but maybe I sounded cross too — I expect so. So sometimes the very worst thought becomes a train that doesn’t stop.

The thought: Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault? Was it my fault?