The Girl in the Red Coat (5 page)

In real life bad things can be fascinating, or very hard to look at. Some turned their eyes to the ground and others stared as I walked past. One, with a trilby-type hat and a Polish accent, called out, ‘Bless you mother; bless you and your little girl. I pray to the Virgin …’ Then I was in the back of the police car. Andy slid in beside me, splashes of blue and red light from the cars on his face.

‘Try not to panic,’ he said very quietly and calmly. ‘Children sometimes wander off.’

‘She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me. Not for this long.’

He turned and smiled, tight at the corners. ‘Then that means she’ll be alright, doesn’t it?’

But nothing was alright. At the police station it was clear nothing was alright at all. Andy’s platitudes were just a ruse to calm hysterics down. Already I could see some kind of action plan had swung into place. They knew … they knew a bright little girl of eight years doesn’t just wander off and not come back. They didn’t know how it had happened before. I wasn’t going to tell them that. And at the station there were more eyes, sheathing their looks of fear and pity or reproach with their lids: the woman behind the counter;
the man unlocking the interview-room door; the woman passing me in the fluorescent-lit corridor, going off duty after carefully applying her eye make-up in the locker-room mirror. Two quick flashes of turquoise as she rounded down her lids and looked at the floor.

‘We need to take a proper statement,’ Andy said. There was a woman already sitting behind the desk in the interview room: round-faced, pretty.

‘This is Sophie, she’s what we call a family liaison officer. She’s there just for you, Beth, for whatever you want …’

She looked at me. It lasted only a moment but the look was deep, deep. I could tell she was reaching in and making some sort of assessment. Moment over, she smiled. ‘Beth, any questions, ask. Anything you need, you must tell me.’

What I need is my little girl back.
‘Hello Sophie,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I sat facing them at the scarred wooden table and they began questioning me and writing my answers in their notebooks and recording my words on a machine. I tried to answer as best I could, I tried to keep my brain focused on the task, but it kept veering off at steep tangents of rising panic, so I would have to refocus and ask them to repeat the question.

‘Tell us about Carmel’s father, we’ll need to get in contact with him quickly. We’ve tried the number you gave us and we passed by the house earlier but there was nobody home.’

I felt such pity for them then – for Paul and Lucy. The rosy flush of their lust was about to be transformed into something hard and brittle – one of those horrible wreaths of ceramic roses in a graveyard, a filthy sepulchre.

‘Oh God – shall I call him?’ I started scrabbling in my bag for my diary, where his mobile number was scratched on the front page. I realised it was the only one I had – no landline – and it seemed such a tenuous thread. Sophie gently put her hand on my arm.

‘We’ll keep on with that. You say you are separated. Any issues with that?’

‘No, not really. I mean he’s stayed away a lot. He’s supposed to see her every weekend but we didn’t see him for months, then all of a sudden he came round and took her out.’

‘So there have been disagreements with access?’

‘I suppose so. No, not really, it’s nothing to do … it’s just that he’s got a new girlfriend and he’s more wrapped up in that. We’ve only just started communicating again, I mean properly. It’s been difficult.’

They exchanged glances.

‘Is there any way, do you think, that he might have taken her?’ Andy asked. ‘I know it’s hard to fathom, but dads can act in funny ways after divorces. Take kids off out of the blue and not tell a soul about it.’

‘It couldn’t have been Paul. He’s too … too lax to do anything like this. Besides, I’m not sure he even knew we were there. No, no, no, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, it’s not him. You must look elsewhere.’ All the same I grasped at the possibility that perhaps I
had
told him, and he’d taken it into his head to spirit her away.

I looked through the window at the dark. ‘He’ll probably be home now. I don’t think they go out much in the evening.’

Sophie left the room briefly, I assumed to give instructions
about hunting Paul down. Soon there would be a police car at their door. Blue lights through the window, sliding down their sitting-room walls.

My watch: eight hours now. I found it hard to sit still. Impossible. Every so often I would feel as if I’d been wired to the grid, a surge of electricity would jolt me forward, or even up to standing, so I was looking down at them. The rising panic – I forced it into my body so my mind could keep functioning and giving them what they needed to know. Kindly, they didn’t comment. They let me pace or bang my head with my hand or slump in the chair with my arms hanging loosely by my sides, as long as I kept talking, kept telling them: when; who; school; friends; dads; any boyfriends of mine; eyes: blue or brown; hair: what colour – thin, thick, curly, straight, short, long.

When the photo albums arrived, it seemed peculiar to see them there, uprooted from the shelves at home to lie beside the blinking voice recorder.

They came just as I was describing, screwing up my forehead and trying to be as accurate as possible, the colour of her hair. Not blond, not brown; it was, I finally decided, ‘the exact colour of a brown paper envelope’.

‘Quick, quick.’

We’re running towards the car park and he’s telling me to go faster. He’s tall with long legs so he can run much better than me. He keeps looking back over his shoulder and saying in a panicking voice, ‘No time to waste. Quick as you can.’

I do run as fast as I can but I can’t help it if I keep stumbling. It’s hard when I’m crying and my nose is running and I don’t even have time to find the tissue I know’s in my pocket. Then we get to his car that’s white. I don’t see it till we’re right next to it as it’s the same colour as the fog.

‘We’ll go straight to the hospital,’ he says. Then he unlocks the door.

I slide into the seat next to him. The car’s very clean and the seats are shiny and white too. It starts up and I rub my hands up and down my face and try and get rid of all the snot and tears. But it just mixes together and goes hard so it’s like I’ve got a mask on.

We drive slow because there are other cars in front of us trying to leave.

‘What h-happened?’ I ask. I feel like the whole world is folding up around me and I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life. I feel like I’m living in a programme inside the telly or in a different country where they have bombs and volcanoes.

I can’t see his eyes because of the white mist outside shining on his glasses. ‘My dear’ – his voice goes quiet and kind – ‘she was looking for you in the car park and she got run over by a truck.’

‘Oh, no, no.’ My hands go over my head like something’s going to fall on top of me. ‘Is she … is she alive?’

His mouth goes into a thin straight line. ‘Alive, yes. But very badly injured, Carmel. She probably thought you’d run off.’

‘I didn’t,’ I shout and turn round in the car seat so I’m shouting right at him. ‘I didn’t run off. We just lost each other.’

Then I crumple up a bit because I have that sick guilty feeling. Only it’s not a small stone in my stomach now, but a great big one taking up loads of room and pushing up into my throat. I have the horrible feeling that it’s my fault, because I didn’t want to hold her hand and be good. And I wasn’t being good, if I’m being truthful. I imagine the truck with her brown boots sticking out from underneath, like when the house landed on the witch in
The Wizard of Oz.
Only not like that at all of course because this is real and terrible and my mum isn’t a witch, she’s lovely, even if we were having a small argument that didn’t matter.

I cry for a good long time but my grandfather doesn’t say anything. I cry most of the hard snot off my face until my eyes feel too big for my head. I scrabble around for the tissue in my pocket and blow my nose but there’s too much and it goes over my fingers.

‘Here, have another one.’ My grandfather reaches into the back seat and grabs me a packet of new tissues. I realise then what’s strange about his voice, it sounds Irish or
something and I didn’t know Mum’s dad was Irish.

We’re out on the road now and I stop crying for a minute and for the first time I look at him properly. The thing I notice most about his head is that it’s pale all over. He’s got white hair clipped neat and there’s the fog reflections on his glasses so his face is like a white sheet of paper with just the thin silver edges of his glasses gleaming out.

Suddenly I think he looks like a ghost and I ask, ‘Why didn’t you say hello to us when we saw you earlier?’

‘Oh, Carmel. You know how your mother and me have fallen out.’ And he turns to look at me even though he’s driving. ‘The ingratitude of children is a terrible thing to bear.’

Even though I don’t really understand I don’t like it much because it sounds like it’s a bad thing about my mum and it doesn’t seem right to be saying bad things when a truck has just run right over her.

‘How did you know we were even there?’ I ask. I hadn’t thought about that before. Now I’ve stopped crying my brain is trying to understand the day that’s turning into a terrible broken puzzle with jagged edges and bits missing.

‘I didn’t. I just saw you and thought – there’s my little Carmel.’

‘But how did you know it was me?’

Mum doesn’t talk much about her mum and dad, just – ‘We don’t get on. It’s a shame.’ I miss having a nan and grandad when my friends tell me about the things they do with theirs. Days out and making biscuits, stuff like that.

‘Your mum sends me photographs every year. At Christmas.’

‘Does she?’

‘Yes, and we talk on the phone sometimes. I like to hear the news, even though we don’t get to see each other.’

I guess that must be after I’m in bed because I’ve never heard her.

He turns and gives me a little smile and I can see his eyes then. They’re pale blue and misty-looking but there’s kindness in the circle of blue and his voice sounds like he cares about when they talk on the phone.

‘I know you must have a lot of questions. But there’s not much time right now. It’s very lucky I happened to be there. I’m awful glad I was.’

I just stay quiet because nothing feels lucky today. Nothing’s felt lucky since those dragon wings went over my face and turned everything black.

The car bumps on along through the fog so I can’t even see where we’re going and I start getting this odd feeling that we’re the only two people in the world and driving not on the road, but through the clouds. It seems like anything is possible today, me and Mum saw birds disappearing into a man’s hat even. I can feel something knotty under my fingers so I look down and see there are black stitches in the white seats. I keep running my fingers over and over them. I breathe slow and deep like Mum showed me how to do when I fell over when I was little and there was blood everywhere.

‘Are we nearly at the hospital?’

‘Yeah, nearly there.’

But we keep on driving for ages and I start feeling panicky again. ‘Tell me in minutes how far we are,’ I say.

He does a little laugh and it’s a rattle noise in his throat. ‘I tell you what, dear. Shall I call the hospital and see how she is? Is that a good idea?’ He turns his head and smiles.

‘Yes please.’ My voice sounds small in the car.

He drives onto the side of the road and we park on the grass. He gets a phone out of his pocket and opens the door.

‘Better signal out here,’ he says. He starts to get out, then stops. ‘Have you got a phone, dear?’

‘No.’

He nods and climbs out of the car.

I can see him through the window – just the bottom half holding the phone in his hands and pressing buttons – then the fog disappears him. That’s what I wanted for my birthday but Mum and Dad said NO, and I could only have a phone when I’m older because it fries children’s brains. I told Sara about this and she made a noise like frying bacon and grabbed her head, because she’s having one for her next birthday.

He’s parked us about an inch from a stone wall so there’s not much to see out of my window except crusty stuff growing over it and the bits between the stones crumbling out. I think about getting out of the car but the wall means I wouldn’t be able to open the door on my side. And I don’t want to get the white seats dirty by climbing over them and getting out on the other side. I feel frozen into a lump and now Grandad is outside the car and not with me I’m frightened because I don’t know him. I wonder what my mum would think about me being with him, and the idea that she doesn’t know where I am gives me shivers all over. Then the door opens and makes me jump and Grandad can see I’m afraid. He sees it on my face and the way I’m holding my hands together, one inside the other.

‘Now then, Carmel, I don’t want you worrying away.’ He slides in next to me and puts his hand on my shoulder.
His voice has gone soft and kind.

I nod. I feel a bit better now he’s back and he knows what to do and where to go and everything.

‘I don’t want you worrying but I have to tell … I’m afraid I have to tell you we can’t go to the hospital right now.’

This makes me sit bolt upright. ‘Oh, why? Why?’

He shuts the door on his side with a click.

‘Your mother’s been taken to theatre. We can’t see her now.’

This is another big hole opening up in the puzzle. ‘Theatre? Why would she go to the theatre?’

He smiles a little crooked smile then, more on one side than the other.

‘No, dear. Not that kind of theatre. It’s what they call the place where doctors do operations. They’re going to try and fix her. Isn’t that good news?’

I lean back, tired out. ‘Oh.’

He doesn’t think I’m being happy enough about it. ‘It’s very good news, Carmel.’

‘I suppose,’ I mumble. But I don’t like to think of my mum having an operation with a big light shining on her while she’s asleep.

‘There’s no point us going there now. They said to call tomorrow. Are you thirsty, dear?’

I nod. My throat feels scraped out. He opens the glove box and gets out a bottle of water. It’s only half full like someone else has been drinking from it and I don’t like the idea of that so I try to drink without my mouth touching it too much.

‘We’ll go back to my place for the time being. Just until we’ve heard something. I’ll fix you something to eat.’

‘Alright,’ I say, even though what he’s just said wasn’t really a question.

He starts the car again and it’s so big it sort of flops back onto the road.

I think of something. ‘What about Dad?’

‘Well, I’ve just spoken to him too. He’s on his way to the hospital and he’s very pleased there’s someone to take care of you. He said he can’t think straight right now.’

‘Oh.’ That sounds like Dad. I lean back feeling sleepy and trying not to be. All I can think is that I wish I was at home with Mum and everything was back to normal. That this wasn’t worth a stupid story about a fairy who has to earn her wings. Or even meeting the real writer. Where are fairies and writers now when you need them? If I was with Mum, and everything was OK, I wouldn’t try to get away from her again. I’d stay close to her all the time. I wouldn’t even try looking over the wall at home, not ever.