The Girl in the Red Coat (23 page)

Dorothy sits on the stripy camp chair. ‘What did they say?’

‘They say they can’t believe it. Though men of science are generally unbelievers, that is well known. But they say the evidence is before their eyes.’

Dorothy’s tapping her nose. ‘So it’s confirmed? There is a confirmation?’

He nods.

‘Medical confirmation?’

‘Yes, yes, I told you. They say they don’t believe it was the child, that something else must be at play. But they can’t explain what, they can’t explain because they are faithless.’

Tap, tap, tap. ‘This is all for the good, this confirmation. Forgive me, Dennis, but I couldn’t be sure before, not truly in my heart. But we can make good now, it’ll be easier now that we know for ourselves the truth of the matter. Carmel …’ she calls out to me, ‘you must be a very obedient girl for us from now on. No more waywardness. Think of our house, the one we could have, and three ponies, one for each of you.’

I don’t know what she means so I keep quiet. I keep looking
at my hands, though in amazement now I’ve felt what they can do. I sniff at them to see if they smell different and even lick my palm but there’s just salt. It’s the same as the time with Melody – there’s still shocks in them. Before that, too, when I was little, except I didn’t know what it was then.

Only it’s not what Dorothy says about doctors and it’s not Gramps that’s shown me. It was Celie.

Some people come and throw stones at the truck.

‘They think we’re chancers, itinerants,’ says Dorothy – same as she said before. ‘You’ll have to get us into a proper park.’

Then us children see a man taking photos of us. We decide not to tell, that it’s our secret. We make up stories about him. I say he’s a spy, Melody says he’s the devil and Silver says he looks like a rat’s ass. That makes us laugh so hard we roll round on the ground.

We cut ourselves with a knife sneaked from Dorothy and swear never to tell and drip our blood into each other.

‘Now we’re sisters,’ says Melody.

I feel warm all over when she says that. ‘Honest? What d’you say, Silver?’

‘I guess.’ She doesn’t sound sure but she wipes the knife on her knickers and then holds my hand. We run back laughing and put the knife back.

But Dorothy says she knows about the man with the camera anyway – she’s seen him too. Then the people with stones come again and us children are so scared we hide under the bunk beds. While I’m lying there squashed I have a daydream about Nico coming to rescue me. Later, we
creep out and there’s dents in the side of the truck where the stones landed. So Gramps drives us off to a park. He says it’s better anyway because he’s made a contact nearby.

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.

Gramps is excited. There’s a man wants to see me who he says is important.

‘We’ll meet the pastor in town. We’ll dress up and you need to be the best behaved you’ve ever been,’ says Gramps.

‘Can we come?’ asks Silver.

‘No, just me and Carmel.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Silver’s eyes go hard on me. She’s still not as friendly as Melody, even if we did swear to be sisters.

Today the sky is white and hot and Gramps takes me to a lovely hotel that looks like it’s from Hollywood with white pillars either side of the door and trees in pots. Gramps holds my hand tight and his is shaking. Inside it’s cool and the carpet looks like it’s made of red velvet.

Gramps goes up to the desk. ‘We’re here to see Pastor Munroe.’

‘Why yes, he’s waiting for you.’ The lady behind the desk is pretty and has tiny gold leaves hanging from her ears. ‘Hello sweetie. What a little doll she is.’

She leans over the desk to smile at me and I get a whiff of her delicious perfume that smells of fruit and cakes and I stuff as much of it up my nose as possible I’m so greedy for it.

‘Yes, yes. Thank you. We’ll see the pastor now. Where is he?’

She points to her left. ‘Through there, having coffee. Bye
sweetie,’ she calls after me as Gramps leads me off. I look over my shoulder and see her getting smaller and smaller as I walk away.

‘Dennis.’

Gramps freezes. The voice has come from behind a plant.

‘Munroe? Are you there?’

A man’s head pops up above the plant.

‘Dennis. Over here, come sit down and bring the child.’

We go and sit with Munroe. His skin is very clean, even the pink flappy bit that goes from his chin to his white shirt collar. His teeth look too big for his head.

A lady dressed in black and white brings over a silver teapot. ‘Can I get something for you, child?’ she asks. She’s got a lovely slow voice.

Gramps says, ‘Milk, she’ll have milk.’

They pour the tea, but guess what? It’s not tea but coffee that comes pouring out – I can tell by the smell – and I’ve never seen coffee coming out of a pot before. All the time Munroe is looking at me and smiling.

‘So, this is Mercy.’

I’m about to say, no, actually this is Carmel, but Gramps butts in really quickly and says, ‘Yes that’s right. Praise the Lord.’ I press my nails into my palms until they hurt and stare at him hard, but he doesn’t take any notice.

‘Yes. Praise the Lord.’ Munroe almost shouts it out and I find it quite embarrassing because people turn their heads to look.

They talk together, their heads close and their voices dipping down low. I sit looking at my milk and not drinking it, watching the surface turning thick and creamy. I’m remembering – there was a calendar behind the lady’s head at the
counter, one where the numbers fall down every day. Today, it said, was May 30. I start feeling sick.

‘Gramps,’ I say. I didn’t even know I was going to say it, it was so sudden. ‘Have I had my birthday?’

They look up and both their sets of eyes are shiny, like they’ve been drinking beer. ‘Your birthday?’ He looks confused.

‘It happens in March and I can’t remember it …’ We had Christmas and went to a church. It was a horrible day missing Mum and all the Christmas things we used to do. ‘My birthday always comes after Christmas.’

‘Birthdays …’ He bends his head down to Munroe again and they both chuckle old-men chuckles and shake their heads in a way that means: kids, eh? All they ever think about is presents and balloons and surprises.

A tiny fly – very black – circles round the glass and falls into the milk.

Their voices are low but once Gramps says in a louder voice, ‘No, not television.’ Munroe spreads out his hands to show him to calm down.

My hands and feet tingle with strangeness. Am I nine now? Have I gone and been nine and not known? Is that possible?

I know the fly’s struggling. It tries to swim across the glass, its legs keep poking up out of the white and look like nose hairs, but it’s drowning under the milk. I think, I should rescue it, I really should, take the spoon from Gramps’s coffee cup and spoon it out. But I don’t. I start getting that guilty feeling but I just watch and watch and I can feel some sweat above my top lip growing. Munroe stops talking to Gramps and looks over at me. When he smiles his teeth look plastic.

I wipe my top lip and water comes away on my fingers. I
think of Munroe in the milk drowning with his arms and legs sticking out. I imagine they’re swapped around and he’s tiny and the fly is as big as him and sitting in the red velvet chair twitching its legs and sucking up coffee through its beak.

‘What are you doing, child?’ Gramps asks.

I’ve taken his silver spoon and I fish out the fly from the milk and dollop it onto the white saucer that my milk came on. It lies in a puddle twitching. It’s trying to shake the milk off its body so it can be free again.

Munroe says, ‘These things breed dirt and destruction.’ And before I can stop him he reaches over and squishes the fly in his paper napkin and all that’s left is black bits squished on the white.

Back in the truck. I’m on my bed and shoving my face hard into the crochet covers. The doors are open and Melody and Silver are playing outside even though it’s starting to rain.

‘Come out and play,’ calls Silver.

I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk.

‘What’s the matter with her now?’ I hear Dorothy’s voice saying. She’s further away than the twins so her voice is thinner.

‘It’s ’cos she didn’t get a present on her birthday.’

‘It’s not that. It’s not, it’s not.’ I thought I’d never speak again but now I’m shouting.

‘Oh Lord,’ says Dorothy, like I’ve added one more thing to her problems.

But Silver won’t stop. I wish she’d shut up, I really do.

‘She’s mad – she didn’t get a cake with candles. Or people coming to a fancy big party bringing gifts tied up with pink ribbons.’

I’m guessing that’s how Silver would like
her
party to be.

I hear Melody’s voice. ‘I’ll make you a cake, Carmel. I’ll get one of the patty tins and stir up some grass and we’ll use twigs for candles …’

Melody’s whispering voice is near. She’s probably right by the door and staring in. But I’m lying down again and burying myself in and wishing and wishing I wasn’t there. I don’t care about the cake. I don’t care about the presents. But how can you be nine and not know about it? How can that even be possible? Mum said nine was important because it was the last one before I went into double figures and come what may we’d do something really special.

‘Leave me alone,’ I shout into the bed cover. It goes hot and wet from my breath. ‘I was nine and no one bothered to tell me. Leave me alone all of you. I want my mum.’ The longing for her is hurting me it’s so bad.

I hear Dorothy again. Her voice floating over on the wind. ‘Leave her be, girls. Just leave her be and she’ll get over it.’

Later, Dorothy walks us to the gas station to get an ice-cream cone. We all have green except for Dorothy who has white. We sit on benches by the gas station to eat them, Dorothy and the twins on one bench and me on the other.

She’s got her arms round both of them and eats her ice cream with long slow licks. They lean against her, one either side, and sometimes she puts the underneath of her chin on top of their heads. I know when she does this she’s liking the feeling of their sun-hot hair and how much she loves them. Melody twists her head and smiles up at her and Dorothy kisses her right above her eyes.

‘For one, then always for the other,’ she says, and makes
sure she kisses Silver in the exact same spot. ‘My beautiful peas,’ she calls them.

Then she starts talking to them in Spanish – laughing and hugging them tight.

I suck most of my ice cream up in one go.

‘Where are you going?’ asks Dorothy, as I get up.

I toss the rest of the cone in the bin. ‘To see if they’ve got a bathroom.’

The old man we bought the ice cream off watches me pass and his head looks like it’s floating behind the window. The toilet’s in a shed out the back with a string instead of a chain to flush. A fly’s licking something off the wall. When I’ve flushed I close the toilet and sit on the seat and listen to the fly. Each time it moves to another bit of the wall it buzzes and it just seems real happy to be there – like it doesn’t even know it’s trapped in a dark cold box where people come and do their business. I feel for the pen I keep now in my pocket and spend ages scratching on the wall –
Carmel Was Here
– and I draw a little heart underneath and when I’m done the fly does a walk around the
C
and for some reason that makes me happy, like we’re having a small celebration together.

Outside Melody’s there and I wait while she goes.

‘You been writing on the wall again, Carmel?’ she says when she comes out drying her hands on a paper towel.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Well, I hope Mom doesn’t need to go ’cos you’ll be getting it again.’

Dorothy went crazy when she found my name written in glitter glue on the truck number plate. I thought I’d done it too small for her to see but her eyes are sharp as anything. I
flick a bug that’s landed on my arm. ‘I don’t care.’

We sit on the concrete by the two old gas pumps. The blue paint of them is starting to flake away and I stick my thumbnail under a peel and scratch some more off, wondering why it always feels good to do that.

‘I’m sorry Mom didn’t remember your birthday.’ Because it’s starting to be evening she’s got a jumper on over her dress that Dorothy knitted, but I don’t know where Dorothy got that colour wool from. It’s in between pink and orange and it’s so bright it makes your teeth hurt as much as pushing them into ice cream, but Melody seems to like it; she wears it a lot.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘It’s not your fault anyway.’

Behind the shop hut is a jungle of trees and there’s monster red flowers on some of them.

‘No, but it’s not fair.’

‘But …’ I don’t know how to say I don’t mind any more. I look over to where Dorothy’s still holding Silver on the bench.

‘Your mom looks a bit like Jesus’s mother, except she’s got twin girls instead of a boy.’

I’ve just realised that Gramps talks about Jesus a whole lot and God of course but Jesus’s mum never gets a mention.

‘I guess. They’ve both got long hair.’ She’s quiet for a bit. ‘Do you feel different knowing you’re nine?’

‘I think so.’ I lift my nose up and smell the petrol hanging about: I like it – the smell is like spirit. Or like a lady’s perfume, but dangerous. Here – with the blue paint, the red flowers and Melody’s tooth-hurting jumper and the smell of gas and the floating head and knowing I’m nine – I’ve grown up, not slowly, like you usually do, but in a rush.
And I’m not even just nine; I’m nine and a bit – maybe even nearly up to a quarter. I press my hands flat on the hot blue metal of the gas pumps.

‘Gramps says there’s some mighty power in those hands,’ says Melody, her face all serious.

My hands look bigger than I ever remember them. Nine-year-old hands. ‘Yes. I can feel it now when I lay them – what they’re doing.’

‘What does it feel like?’

‘Like shocks. I can make it happen.’

‘D’you like it?’ She’s picking the paint off too now.

I shrug. ‘It makes me dizzy.’ I get a good peel of paint under my fingernail and pull off a whole strip.

I lean back and let the hot metal of the gas pump warm my back. Everywhere feels alive, even the air, and the feeling goes inside me and hurts but in a way that’s nice. I know now that Dorothy loves her twins, but not me, even though I’ve been trying to make her, and I realise that, maybe, it’s a relief because she’s not my mum. And if she tried to be, and we loved each other, that would be only one life, with her – she would become my mom for ever and I’d have to be the way she wanted me to be. The way it is, I’m not her daughter – so I can have any life. It could go any way.

In the end we do have a party. Dorothy buys a cake with pink icing and puts nine pink candles on it. She gives me a present wrapped up in birthday paper; it’s a white dress, with silver nylon lace round the neck, the front and the bottom, and some stickers of ladybirds and butterflies. I share those with the twins and we stick some on our faces. I put a butterfly in between my eyes.

‘You can wear the dress today,’ she says. ‘Because being nine’s so special Pastor Munroe is going to take you to his church. They’re all expecting you.’

At least I got red shoes to go with it. When we went shoe buying I tucked my legs under the chair and wouldn’t try anything else on. I thought, no more crappy patent leather for me because now I know I’m nine I can think like that. Dorothy just gave in. She probably remembered the coat.

Gramps says, ‘It’ll be a great day. Word is spreading.’

‘Alright,’ I say. Going to Pastor Munroe’s church doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you do on your birthday. I like going to mazes and things. Mum said for my ninth birthday she might even take me on a ferry somewhere.
Don’t think about that, Carmel.

Dorothy says, ‘Take those off your face. And look at your hair, child. We need to fix that. You look like you’ve got a bird’s nest on your head.’

I put my hands up to feel the bird’s nest. My hair’s got all long again so the curls are more stretched out. She gets a brush and brushes it really hard. I still like it when she does things like this for me in spite of how mean she can be. She scrubs my face so the stickers come off.

My hair goes snap, crackle and pop from the brushing. ‘Look,’ I say to the twins, pointing at my head.

They both laugh a lot. ‘It looks like you’ve had an electric shock,’ says Silver, and I laugh too. She’s got a ladybird on her face that looks like it’s crawling up into her eye. She calls it a ladybug and I like that a lot. That’s what I’m going to say from now on.

Dorothy doesn’t think it’s funny. She gets a spray out of the truck and sprays water over my head.

‘Now stand still and get dry in the sun and don’t run about. Or eat any more cake. Or put any more of those stickers on your face. I’ve never seen a child who can turn as messy as you in five minutes flat.’