The Girl in the Red Coat (18 page)

‘Who is she?’ The prickles are back.

‘She was with Pa, when Mom first went with him.’

I touch her little face in the photograph. ‘What happened to her? Where is she now?’

They both shrug. Melody says, ‘She went off with Pa. Then he called Mom up on the phone and said she’s got to get on a plane and join him. Then you came back with them. We asked him where did Mercy go, and he tells us, “We’ve got Carmel now. We mustn’t talk about Mercy no more. Never ever.”’

Silver’s nodding away, agreeing with her.

‘So you mustn’t say we told.’

‘But.’ I’m not sure ‘but what’. I just know I’ve got my prickles back.

‘You mustn’t, Carmel. Honest, you promise? Or we can’t show you nothing again,’ says Silver.

‘Was she my sister?’ I don’t know why I asked that. Except she looks like me and all.

Silver shrugs. ‘We dunno.’

‘But, but … why didn’t you like her?’

‘So quiet and praying. Always on her knees with Pa. She was boring,’ says Silver.

Silver puts the little book with Mercy’s picture back in its place on the shelf.

‘Hey, I want to look some more, I want to read the paper in there.’

‘No, they’ll be back soon. We can’t get caught. Promise you won’t tell – or we won’t play with you any more.’

‘I need to look at her …’ My hand flies up to snatch at it but Silver grabs my arm.

‘No, I knew we shouldn’t have told.’ I start shoving her onto the bed but Melody is howling, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ and pulling my skirt so hard I shoot back and nearly land on her.

Both their faces have gone the colour of milk. ‘I knew you’d get us into trouble,’ says Silver. ‘If we even go near Pa’s stuff he gets mad. We should never have showed you.’

‘Promise you won’t look again,’ Melody says. ‘Please. You might get caught.’

We’re all panting hard. ‘OK, I won’t,’ I lie. ‘I promise.’

I walk down the steps and look over the bubbling river where I nearly drowned, thinking about the girl hidden on the shelf and who she is. She looks so much like me and now – now we have the same name.

Even from here, when I look back at the truck, it’s like I can see the book winking at me from the shelf. ‘One day,’ I say under my breath, ‘I’ll look at you properly.
Detective Wakeford
will come and find you.’ I’ll need to carry out a search of everything, I think, and my stomach tingles.

‘Mercy, who are you?’ I say, as if she could hear me. ‘I wish you were here now, so you could tell me. I’m Carmel.’

Then a kind of shaking inside happens because when I told her my real name everything was so quiet – just the river bubbling and the river doesn’t care. The sound disappeared in the air and I don’t feel sure at all any more that I’ve won about my name. I take out the biro from my pocket and bash it with a rock till I have a plastic dagger. I pick three rocks and scratch, scratch. When I’m done I put them in a row but they remind me of gravestones like that so I pile them one on top of the other in this order:

DAY 163

Firsts. First day into town on my own.

I’ll walk, I thought, it’ll give me some exercise, though I knew really that way I could be looking too.

It felt peculiar to be alone out in the countryside. The wide sky, full of watery blue and grey, was still there. The cries of the birds echoed unchangingly around me. I was moving through a world that knew nothing except for the progress of the seasons. And was there, could I feel it, a nip of autumn in the air? Was it that time of year already?

The tramp of my footsteps marked out a steady beat. Every so often I would stop and lift my nose, and turn in a circle, scanning. I’d become a pair of eyes, a functionary being made for searching: my legs a forked vehicle, nothing but a looking post. Stop it, I scolded myself. She’s not here.

I carried on along the familiar country road until I was on the outskirts of town. The houses, scattered at first, began to bunch closer together and form into streets. I stopped and tilted up my ear. The muted sounds of children playing drifted over me in a chattering cloud. With a convulsion I realised I was near Carmel’s school and if I carried on I’d pass the red-brick Victorian building with the cheerful butterfly collages in the window.

‘Oh my, oh my,’ I muttered to myself, changing direction
so I would skirt the little school entirely.

Then I was in the street surrounded by shops and people pushing past, some loaded with shopping bags, or smoking, or eating rolls from paper bags – little snow flurries of grated cheese cascading onto their lapels – or talking into their phones, or staring into space. Being among this mass of people felt as strange as being alone had done an hour earlier; so strange I moved close to the shops on the side of the pavement and crept along with my hand running along the buildings for support. Further along I encountered an old man in a tweed coat who was employing the same method – creeping snail’s pace – and we had to negotiate for a moment which one of us would part company with the wall.

But I knew what was ahead and it was getting closer and closer and I wanted to see but I didn’t. Because I’d been playing a silly mind trick – if the red shoes are there, is that an omen that she’s alive? But how could they be, after all this time? So I changed it to – if there’s any red shoes in the window, I’ll take that. That can be my sign.

All the while I was telling myself I couldn’t live on omens and tricks of the light and signs from the heavens because if I did it would make me go mad. But still I had to see. I glimpsed the familiar Clarks green of the awning ahead and I crept and crept like a cripple towards it, until finally I was right in front of the window and looking at the green felt miniature landscape inside and the little ledge where the shoes had perched for so long. And the red shoes were gone: in their place a brown pair with ornate white zigzag stitching and a fat pink flower stitched to each toe. They were placed at a perky angle to each other, as though ready
at a moment’s notice to go running right out of the window and down the street. I scanned the window – blue, brown, pink, black, not a single pair of red, not one. I held onto the windowsill because for a moment I thought I’d fall and crash through the glass.

‘Oh, oh …’ My breath came out shallow and fast. I grabbed onto the brass column of the door handle and pushed, falling into the cool dark shop. Inside it was quiet, small shoes the colour of sweets displayed on white painted mountings. Bright plastic foot-shaped measuring devices with outsized tape measures and a plastic machine in the corner where Carmel had once laughed when the device tickled as it clamped her foot.

A young woman behind the counter, examining her nails.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’ she asked. ‘Or do you want to browse?’

‘Browse.’ My voice sounded hoarse.

I went round the shop, stopping sometimes and picking something up, pretending to examine it. Though God knows why. My eyes took in children’s shoes: little brown boots with fat laces; patent leather with round toes and a dusting of cut-out patent flowers; squashy blue sandals. It seemed the only thing I was looking for these days was red, red coats or red shoes, and sometimes I caught a flash of it – like sudden blood – across the room. But now, in my state, I felt it had to be
the
shoes, nothing else would do, and I’d pounce on anything red to see if they were the same ones, knowing I was torturing myself stupidly because so much time had gone. Each time I picked up a shoe, of course, it wasn’t the pair I would recognise anywhere, with the twin diamond shapes cut out of the front and the tiny
holes punched in the toes like a whiskerless muzzle.

When finally I had done a lap of the shop I found myself back at the counter again with the girl. Frosty white make-up gleamed beneath her eyebrows as she appraised me, and gratefully I saw I hadn’t been recognised.

I cleared my throat. ‘There was a pair of shoes in the window …’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Red ones.’ I think I might have been whispering because she leaned forward to catch what I was saying. ‘They were there for ages.’

‘Boy’s or girl’s?’

‘Girl’s. With diamond shapes cut out. And a buckle. Sandals.’

‘Sandals? Oh no, it’s all back to school now.’

‘Back to school?’

‘Yes. No sandals any more. They were put on sale.’

‘D’you think, d’you think it might be possible that some are still here?’

She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Hilary …’ she shouted through an open door that led into gloom. Then Hilary came through – an older lady with glasses on a chain around her neck – and I had to explain all over again: the window, the diamond shapes, the buckle and the red leather.

‘Yes, dear. Our sale is over now. But … why don’t you go and look, Chloe? Look under the window there. I’ve been having a tidy up.’ Chloe really didn’t want to bother, I could see that. But she started lifting lids off the stack of green boxes piled beneath the window and each time she did, she said, ‘No,’ ‘No,’ ‘No.’ Like we’d sent her on a stupid mission that was doomed to failure.

‘Doesn’t your little girl need to be here to try them on?’ she asked, after she’d opened the last box and delivered her ‘No.’ And the older woman said quite sharply, ‘Chloe, go and look out the back. They could be there,’ and I realised that Hilary had recognised me and was cleverly, discreetly not calling attention to it.

‘We’ll find them, dear. If they’re here.’ My throat closed up at the kindness of her manner and I stood there waiting for resentful Chloe to finish what I imagined to be a cursory search of the stock at the back.

‘I’ll go and help her, dear.’ Hilary joined her colleague in the dark recesses of the stockroom and I imagined Chloe being told and her shocked face with its white make-up popping out of the gloom like two moonbeams.

After some rustling they walked back in a procession with Hilary bearing a green box in her hands and the other girl peeping at me in fascination over her shoulder.

‘Now I can’t be a hundred per cent sure. But are these the ones?’ She lifted the lid and there were the fat ladybird shoes nestling there as if they’d got fed up of being in the window and flown away to hibernate in the box amongst white tissue paper.

I put my hand up to my mouth and grasped at the counter with the other for support.

‘Yes. Yes, they’re the ones.’

‘Well, isn’t that lucky? Doesn’t it just go to show what can happen? All the unsold summer shoes in the stockroom were about due to be sent back.’

‘Can I buy them, please?’ I grabbed at my shoulder bag and dipped my hand in it, fishing around for my purse. Hilary rang them up on the till.

‘You’re not going to …’ Chloe hissed at her. But the older lady waved her away.

‘That’ll be twelve ninety-nine. Cash or card?’

‘Card.’ I remembered my pin number even and Hilary folded the tissue paper gently and carefully, covering up the red, and bagged up the box.

‘There we are, dear. We found them in the end, didn’t we?’

We had. I clung onto the box in my arms. Was this my omen? If so, what did it mean? I’d told myself they had to be in the window, or something red at least. But they were here, the real ones, hidden in the back, in the dark.

I held the box tighter to my chest so I was nearly crushing it. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

I wrapped my arms round the bag with the shoes and hugged them as I set out for home.
I have the shoes, I have the shoes
, just the fact of them being in my possession made me walk taller, made my stride more purposeful. This time I took the route that went past the red-brick school –
first time past her school
– so two firsts today.

The playground was empty now and a dozing silence hovered over the building as I stood motionless looking over the wall at it. I could imagine the children inside, drowsy with lessons, ready for the end of the day. Soon the parents would be gathering in the playground to collect them and that thought made me stir myself to leave.

‘There,’ I told myself as I hurried away, hugging my carrier bag with the box of shoes inside, ‘that wasn’t so bad, was it? See what you can do?’ It was the shoes, I knew, the incredible chance of finding them.

I’m hardly ever left on my own.

While everyone’s off doing different things I stand in the truck and look out over the green lake we’re parked next to and hum a little tune.

I go looking for the stone egg but all I can feel now is a soreness where it used to be. I’m guilty for a second but then I think: it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about Mum, it means I don’t have to die myself because that stone egg was killing me slowly.

Being on my own is making me think of being
untrustworthy
again. This truck is a whole box of secrets and they’re all calling to me and want to tell me things. Skulls, Mercy – they get mixed up so sometimes I think of opening Mercy’s book and seeing a skull where her face should be. It gives me chills.

‘
Detective Wakeford
is here again,’ I say, and just saying that the chills have gone and I’m shaking I’m so excited.

‘Mercy, where are you?’ I search with my eyes but because her book is so thin it must be squashed between the others. One by one I start slipping out the books to see if she’s trapped between them. My hand brushes the leather of Gramps’s notebook and then that calls out to me too, louder than anything else. Dare I? Dare I? I don’t know how long I’ve got. I bite my lip.

Gramps’s writing is large with lots of loops, pages and
pages of it. I’m a good reader though. I was the best in my class. Mostly it seems to be prayers he’s writing. My name – my eye catches on it and I stop breathing. Then I read and I can’t stop because I’ve found a place where Gramps is writing about me and what he says gets the prickles going.

As I’m coming to the end of the page I hear something outside and I shove the book back onto the shelf – quick, quick. Dorothy’s face is at the open door and she’s looking at me hard.

‘What have you been up to, child?’

‘Nothing.’

She stands staring at me and I’m trying to stop my face going red. I’m not doing very well though. There’s burning on my cheeks and ears like I’m on fire.

‘Well, if I find out you have – children in my country get whipped. They get whipped good and proper till their legs burn.’

Maybe she thinks I’m getting upset. Maybe I look it, though what I really am is scared and guilty, because she says, ‘Have an apple.’ She holds out a big yellow one with her hand flat, like you do with a horse. ‘They’re sweet and juicy …’

I shake my head. What she’s saying is nice, but not the way she’s saying it, trying to frighten me. At home there’s a picture of Snow White’s wicked stepmother holding out an apple with poison in it. If she bites into that apple, which she does, she falls asleep for a hundred years.

Dorothy snatches the apple back and walks off. I watch her long plait bouncing against her thin back. For a minute I hate her. I think, you don’t even care about me at all – and I’m running after her. She hears me coming and whips round, quick, quick.

‘I know about you. I know how you keep pictures of human skulls.’ It’s out of my mouth before I know it. I do a big gasp and clap my hand over my mouth as if I could shove the words back in.

She leans back on her feet and crosses her arms and looks at me.

‘What you know, child, is nothing. Nothing about nothing. Go inside.’ Light from the lake moves over her face.

Tears come into my eyes. Maybe Dorothy will be like a proper enemy now. ‘What d’you want?’ she says, when I don’t move.

A big sob comes out. ‘I want you to love me again. You’re supposed to be like my mum. My mum never had any pictures of skulls.’

She’s quiet. I can see she’s thinking.

‘OK then.’ She takes my hand and we go inside. Then she slides her hand under the mattress and pulls out squares of paper. Some of the skulls look like they’re laughing, others are in screams. I hate them, they’re the worst things I’ve ever seen. Now they’ll be inside my mind forever.

‘There, satisfied?’

‘But Dorothy,’ I put my hands up to my face, ‘what, what are they, why d’you keep them?’

‘The Day of the Dead. My ancestors.’ She looks at them. ‘Come outside, child.’

I follow her. She takes a blue plastic lighter out of her pocket that she uses for the fire and touches the flame to the corner of the pictures. Some birds out on the water start flapping and fighting and I nearly jump out of my skin because for a moment I think the skulls have come to life and started shrieking.

‘Now, see, what is it you’re talking about?’

The open mouths scream through the fire that licks their bony faces and then crisp up to burned flakes on the ground. Dorothy stamps on them so they turn into dust twirling away in the wind.

‘There. Nothing can be made from nothing, can it, child?’ That’s what she said before. ‘And if it is I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him you’ve been stealing from the Bible. He won’t like that, will he?’ As she walks off I watch as the ash blows in a puff out over the water.

I sit on the steps and I don’t stop shaking for ages. Whenever Dorothy’s horrible it makes me feel so bad I want to die. Tears trickle down the side of my face. But then I start feeling better, strong even. Dorothy had to burn her horrible skulls because of me.

I’m taking everything out one by one and looking at it like a policeman. I even think about looking for the book with Mercy in it again but then I change my mind. I’ve been in enough trouble for one day.

And
I’ve read Gramps’s secrets, even if I don’t understand them. The way he talks in his book is weird like there’s something wrong with him. Even if it is just Bibleish stuff, I remember telling myself about keeping an eye on him and when I stop shaking I go to find him. He’s chopping wood with an axe and I watch him for a bit when he doesn’t know I’m there.

He spots me at last. ‘Carmel, what are you doing? Standing there and staring.’ He straightens up. There’s a pile of chopped wood next to him and the cut insides are leaking. There’s some lazy flies swooping round his head.

‘Nothing.’

He sees something in my face has changed. He’s good at that, Gramps, but he does it different to me – he does it by watching and listening.

‘Come on, dear. Tell me all about it.’

‘Gramps, why did you and Mum fall out?’ I ask it quickly before I have a chance to change my mind. He called Mum ‘careless’ in his book but I can’t mention that because he’ll know I’ve been reading it. Even though I could tell him he’s wrong.

He pats a log for me to sit on. ‘Now Carmel, we don’t need to be dwelling on past history, we …’

‘But why can’t you tell me? Is it a secret?’

His eyes have gone very pale and I start to feel afraid then, but he puts his arm round me and says in a soft kind voice, ‘I didn’t agree with how she chose to live her life, her marriage. I regret it now, of course I do, I’m full of remorse in my prayers …’

His shoulders start heaving up and down and his hands go up to his face and his throat is making dry sobs. He’s got his energy tight wrapped up inside him and tears ooze from under his hands. He starts looking like a big animal that’s been hurt by a hunter.

‘Gramps, don’t cry,’ I say at last.

‘Child, what an exhibition I make of myself.’ He rubs at his face with his arm.

I put my hand on his arm. ‘You just miss her, that’s all. Same as me.’ And even though he’s been upset I’m glad to know he does.