The Girl in the Red Coat (24 page)

I stand and the twins run round and round me and this makes me laugh again.

Pastor Munroe turns up in a big car with lots of silver bits on it that shine. He stands outside the truck and Dorothy gives him a slice of pink-and-white birthday cake. He stands there with the plate in his hand looking like he doesn’t want it.

‘And how’s our miracle child today?’ He’s looking at me.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I say, very polite. I look down. I’ve got my birthday dress on and it comes nearly to my ankles. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to wear trousers.

Dorothy takes the plate off him – it’s obvious he doesn’t want it. He pats his tummy at the place where he’s wearing a brown leather belt in the trousers of his white suit. ‘Started the day with a big breakfast. No space left for cake.’

He’s looking into our truck. ‘How the heck d’you live in there, the five of you …’ Then he stops, like he’s said it without thinking.

I look at Gramps. I know he gets ashamed about things, about how we live, our clothes.

‘It’s fun,’ I say quickly and the three grown-ups turn round to look at me.

‘Fun?’ says Pastor Munroe.

‘Yes. It’s better than a house – you can go where you want.’ I hate it when Gramps has to look ashamed. It’s like when Dorothy goes on at him about the condo she wants.
That mortgages are easy now and they’re giving them to anyone, even people like us.

‘Well, yes.’ Pastor Munroe rubs his hands together. ‘Shall we get going then? Time to meet the faithful.’

Before we go we all pray there and then with our eyes closed and with people walking up and down the path next to us on the way to the toilet block. It’s so hot I think we’re going to melt but then we get into Pastor Munroe’s car and it turns into a lovely cold fridge in about a second. I wave to Melody and Silver through the window, them and Dorothy aren’t coming with us. I think, they’re my very best friends now.

‘Gramps,’ I ask, ‘what was Mum like when she was nine?’

He thinks for a while then doesn’t turn round when he answers. I notice his best black suit has gone scraggy on the collar. ‘She was like you, Carmel. Just like you. A little angel.’

I’m not, I think, so I bet she wasn’t either. As we start driving I wonder if Nico is going to be at the church. I think that whenever we’re going somewhere new, even though it was ages ago I met him.

Gramps and Pastor Munroe are talking in the front. ‘I thought we could start with the blind beggar who was made to see,’ says Pastor Munroe.

‘Yes, and we could ––’

Munroe interrupts. ‘It’s always good to get the feeling going. Maybe you should let me look after things this time.’

Gramps says OK and looks out of the window.

Thinking about Nico makes me go into the dream I have about him. I don’t see what’s outside the window because inside my head I’m arranging the house for me and Nico to
live in together, just us. There’s orange curtains like at home and a big comfy sofa where we can cuddle up and watch TV. I make me and Nico cook spaghetti for dinner.

I have to stop when the car pulls up outside a church. It’s made of shining new stone and there’s the smoothest greenest grass I’ve ever seen. Stuck into the grass are two bright white crosses, one on each side of the path.

‘Here we are,’ says Pastor Munroe. He drives round the back to where there’s a car park.

‘You have a truly beautiful church here, my friend.’ Gramps is squeezing his neck around so he can look out the window. ‘Very impressive.’ Pastor Munroe makes a noise in his throat that means: ‘I know.’

Even though there’s a door at the back we walk around to the front. Gramps goes on one side of me and Pastor Munroe on the other.

‘Ready?’ Pastor Munroe asks. Gramps doesn’t say anything but he must have nodded as Pastor Munroe opens up the church door. Inside, there’s a red carpet up the middle. The seats are full of people and when the door gets opened they all turn round to stare at us. They stare for a moment then start shouting out. Some of them stand up.

I can tell from his voice Munroe is smiling. ‘Welcome,’ he says to us. This time he makes me and Gramps go first so he’s last in.

ONE YEAR, 162 DAYS

It was the sea that saved me.

I took to swimming – up and down the beach at Cromer, the same place I’d tried to drown. It was an act of defiance. Death, you won’t have me. Not while there’s a chance, not while there’s hope. My body had grown weak and elastic from grief, from too many cigarettes and not eating or sleeping, or when I did in snatches. I needed to get strong again.

I ploughed up and down under the huge skies – moving, constantly changing, with big white clouds flying across them, or pinky-grey ones that burst into rain showers on my head while I was in the water.

Sometimes pure blue.

Pure blue, like the sky was on the morning I knew I had to change things; that I’d been steadily retreating into a world that I didn’t recognise, and where I couldn’t be reached.

My first day – the induction day for nurses’ training. Too soon, everyone said. I responded by saying I was afraid I might already be too late. That maybe I’d fallen through some cellar door and I was trapped there and the only way I could think of getting out was by doing this. Actions: for other people.

All the same I nearly turned back that first day. I’d
parked my car and I was walking towards the building – a one-storey sixties block. It’d been raining and the water shone on the tarmac, making doubles of the others turning up for
their
first day. They looked so – how can I say? Ordinary. Good ordinary. In the way I felt I’d never be again. They swung their bags, weighted with books, onto their shoulders and splashed across the wet ground and up the three steps to the entrance. I hung back. How could I possibly join them in all their glorious ordinariness? Suddenly this seemed a crazy enterprise.

I turned to go.

Then, as my vision was swinging away from the three steps, the people and back towards the car park, I changed my mind again.
Courage
, I told myself,
courage. Courage,
I made one foot go in front of the other.
Courage
, up the steps. I found the room number,
courage
, I opened the door.

Some people looked up and smiled and I smiled back.

I settled into a chair at the back and got out my notepad and pen and lined them up on the desk. This is the only way, I told myself. I have to do something. It’s the only way to survive. If I can do something good then maybe it will go a tiny way to right the balance of what’s happened. It was magical thinking, but it’s what I figured – if I put some good into the world then that’s what might bring her back, not incessant looking. It might tip some scales that exist in the natural order; it might tip them in our favour. I couldn’t sit – day after day – in that big lonely house, with the
floorboards
sighing and asking where she was, the beech tree knocking at the wall to enquire if she was back yet. And someone like Graham, who I liked so much, being kept at arm’s length.

Besides, there was something I hadn’t told anyone about. The real reason I was sitting there. The reason I couldn’t go back.

One day I woke up on the sofa. It was afternoon already and I was muzzy from whisky the night before. I flicked on the TV without getting up and I saw planes flying into towers. I saw it and sat up with a gasp and my only thought had been ‘Thank God’. I think I even shouted it out loud, ‘Thank God.’ Because it seemed to me that for the first time something was happening that was equal to the rending of the universe that had happened to me.

Later, I went for a walk. I saw all that and I was pleased, I told myself. What kind of person would Carmel find if she returned now? Whisky-smelling, baying at tragedy like a half-starved dog. When I got back to the house, sloshing up the path in my muddy wellingtons, I realised something else too.

It had been the first time I’d been out of the house and not looking.

The smell of sickness stops being like lamb’s blood. I get used to it.

Carmel gets lost sometimes from being called Mercy so much in church. When that happens I get some paper and write ‘My name is Carmel’ a hundred times. I keep it in my pocket.

Not all the people look sick. I hear them say ‘cancer’ out of the sides of their mouths to Gramps. He’s always next to me. I lay my hands on them and feel for the ropes of light and scrunch up my eyes tight so I can concentrate on making them flame up.

Sometimes I think about how my dad never believed in God and my mum wasn’t sure. It makes me worry; everyone says you go to hell when you die if you don’t.

Tonight, we’re going to a hospital even though it’s the middle of the night and dark. Gramps and Munroe take me to a door by the side. The light over the door isn’t shining, more leaking pale green stuff onto Munroe’s face as we wait. A man in a uniform that looks like blue pyjamas comes to meet us. The uniform is tight across his fat stomach.

‘I’ll check the coast is clear,’ he says.

‘Who is he?’ I ask Gramps when he’s gone.

Gramps smiles down. ‘A nurse.’

The nurse comes back. ‘OK, but we have to keep it real quiet.’

We follow the nurse down long shiny corridors. There’s rooms on each side with people sleeping.

‘Are we here for healing?’ I whisper to Gramps. ‘There’s too many of them.’

‘It’s alright,’ he says. ‘Just one.’

We stop by a room and go in. Machines hum insect sounds, doing the breathing for the old man in the bed.

‘Oh no. No. Not him, not this man,’ I say under my breath.

The nurse stands by the door. ‘We don’t have long,’ he says over his shoulder.

Gramps takes his Bible out from his big coat pocket and starts to read. Munroe smiles at me.

‘I can’t,’ I say. They haven’t heard me.

Then Gramps stops reading. ‘OK, dear. Lay your hands.’

‘I can’t,’ I say, louder.

‘Why ever not, child? This is no time for shallying, we have to get this done quick.’

Above the bed is a dark shape, turning, flopping over – lazy but strong.

Munroe and Gramps can’t see it. ‘I don’t like him. I think, I think … he did some bad things.’

‘What are you saying, child?’ Munroe’s getting cross now. ‘Mr Peters was a true believer, a good and faithful servant.’

My brain’s working fast and this is what it’s telling me –
they can’t make you because they can’t do what you do, Carmel. It’s from your hands, not theirs
– and it’s the very first time I’ve realised this. It comes to me like a big beam of light shining on something that was there all the time, I’d just never had a chance to see it before.

‘I won’t do it. I don’t want to make him better.’ They look at me in shock.

‘Listen, girl.’ Munroe’s taking steps towards me and I look again at the black thing and my stomach turns over.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I –’ I try to think of the right word, ‘I refuse.’ I hold my breath; I’ve never refused before.

Munroe flips his jacket open and slides his hand in and it comes to me maybe there’s a gun in there. I freeze solid to the spot, but all he does is say, ‘Take charge of her, will you, Dennis?’

But Gramps doesn’t get a chance to do anything because we hear a shout and there’s a nurse with a little white hat pushing past the man at the door.

‘What the hell …?’

Munroe takes his hand out of his jacket and puts both hands up to calm her down. ‘Now then. We just need to do what we can for our brethren. We …’

She doesn’t give him a chance to finish. ‘I’ve got specific instructions from the family – none of you people. Now get out. Get out and take your hocus-pocus and your hell and damnation with you. One minute more and I’m calling security.’

Her cheeks get two red spots on them and a piece of hair comes away from her hat and goes over her eye. ‘And a child too. In the middle of the night. Does she even go to school? What’s her name?’

‘I’m Carmel,’ I say, as quick as I can. ‘My name’s Carmel.’ I always especially want ladies to know that.

‘We’re going,’ says Gramps. ‘Be it on your conscience you denied this man succour and the healing gift of the Lord.’

‘I’ll live with that.’

The lady nurse watches us leave from the top of the corridor, frowning and with her arms crossed. On the way out the rooms float past me, each one with its person sleeping inside, like a picture of a beehive I once saw in school. Gramps and Munroe’s backs stretch up in front of me and I have the awful feeling I’m following the wrong way, that what I should really be doing is turning right round and back to the nurse. I think of how nice and calm it would be to have a hat and a white dress and be able to lay hands in a place like this with her and get to choose all the time, but Gramps turns round just at that second and says, ‘Don’t dawdle.’

We stop at a diner even though it’s the middle of the night. I have a Coke to drink. They’re both stirring their coffee and saying how terrible the lady nurse was. She reminded me of my mum – the same brown hair and getting cross if she thinks something bad is happening to someone – so I don’t like them saying how the nurse is going to burn in hell.

‘Goddam bitch,’ says Munroe and the way he looks at me as he’s saying it makes me think he’s not just talking about the lady nurse.

Gramps’s hot coffee spills over his fingers when Munroe uses that B word – one thing you can say about Gramps is that he never swears or curses and he doesn’t like it when other people do. He climbs out from next to me to get some napkins from the counter and then it’s just me and Munroe looking at each other over the sugar shaker.

‘Since when did you get so uppity? You need to be kept on a tighter leash so you do as you’re told. This healing’s a gift that needs to be put through the proper channels, you can’t just go about deciding who and what you’ll see.’

‘Not Mr Peters, that’s for sure,’ I say it under my breath but he’s heard.

‘The old man lets you speak to him like that?’

I just blink.

‘Mercy, I said – he lets you speak to him like that?’

And the Coke I’ve drunk is there right in my throat and in the back of my mouth because when Pastor Munroe leaned forward his jacket puffed out and I really did see a gun inside.

Gramps is back and looking at our faces. ‘What’s up?’

Munroe leans back in his chair and I wonder if I imagined seeing that gun in his jacket, even though I’ve still got the picture of its golden teeth round the middle of it.

‘Nothing, my friend.’

Gramps sits down and they start talking again but I can hardly even hear what they’re saying because now the empty chair next to Munroe isn’t empty any more. There’s something, turning, lazy.

I suck on my straw and the Coke comes up, rolling towards me, loud as a train.

‘Goddam bitch,’ says Munroe again. He takes a sip of coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and the sound of it is like his face is tearing open.

Gramps says, ‘Now then, there’s no need. No need …’

My eyes turn gummy. The shape is rising, rising above Munroe’s head. It pumps out, bigger. It’s in no hurry. Even though I can’t see it, I know deep inside there’s an eye somewhere and it’s turning, looking up and down and sideways in a searchlight. It’s from the hospital.

‘They shouldn’t let unbelievers set foot inside a hospital, Dennis. They should be cast out to work in the places where they belong – bars and casinos.’

‘I have to go to the toilet.’ My voice sounds as if it’s in another room.

‘Go ahead,’ says Gramps next to me. He’s leaning back on the red seats and wiping his face with a hanky.

My feet are heavy like there might be pieces of iron strapped to their underneaths. Halfway to the bathroom I get stuck. I don’t know if I’m going backwards or forwards. It’s another face – Mercy’s – on the back of my head and she’s walking opposite to me so we’re stuck in glue.

I make my feet lift up one by one the way
I
want to go and it’s so hard my face goes wet with sweat. At last: the bathroom and the door shushing behind us. The plastic behind the mirror, round the basin, is sparkling like a million diamonds are stuck inside. It’s dark: except for a light above the mirror that shines on the face there. A pale small face. Eyes are round dead stones. Mouth – full of things to say but always quiet. Carmel’s gone. I turn: just hair on the back of my head. Not there either. It’s Mercy’s face looking back at me in the mirror. In the room somewhere is the dark thing and the search eye is looking for us.

It wants me. It wants me like Gramps and Munroe do. They want the Carmel who is Mercy. They want us to be one girl.

‘Sorry,’ I say to the girl. ‘But I need for Carmel to come
right back
this minute.’

I start talking and I say it real fierce. I have to say it before it all gets forgotten.

‘This is what you must remember.
My name is Carmel Summer Wakeford. I used to live in Norfolk, England. My mum’s name was Beth and my dad’s name is Paul. He has a girlfriend called Lucy. I lived in a house with a tree by the
side and a spider’s web by the back door. My mum had a glass cat she kept by her bed. There was a picture up that said T
HERE’S
N
O
P
LACE
L
IKE
H
OME
. The curtains downstairs were orange. My teacher’s name was Mrs Buckfast. One time my dad took me sailing. My name is Carmel. My name is Carmel Summer Wakeford.’

I stop and look around me.

I’m Carmel. I’m alone.