Kate Hamer - The Girl in the Red Coat

‘Ah, there’s Dorothy. Waiting for us.’

She’s wearing a skirt that nearly comes down to her ankles and she’s got long hair whipping about in the wind. She looks so much like a puppet of a black witch standing there in her castle that under my breath I say what Mum told me to say whenever I’m frightened.

Courage, Carmel. Courage.

And it always works, well, nearly always. Dorothy doesn’t seem so frightening once we’re inside and I can see her properly in the light coming from a bulb hanging in the hallway. She’s got light brown skin and sort of sleepy but clever eyes. She leans down towards me and says, ‘So this is little Carmel.’

I nod. And even though I don’t know her it’s nice to be with a lady again. She smells of cooking and spices and looks a bit like something from the olden days too with her long black skirt and red blouse tucked into it.

She takes my hand. ‘Come, child, you must be starving.’ I realise she sounds foreign.

We go down the hall and she opens a door and there’s a place with coats and boots and she opens another door and there’s a kitchen with a long wooden table running right down the middle of it. It’s much, much newer than the big hall; it’s got shiny new white cupboards.

‘This is our part of the house, Carmel. Isn’t it nice?’

I nod, even though nothing seems very nice at the moment.

‘The rest isn’t finished so we rented it good and cheap, they did us a real good deal.’ Her face looks very pleased about this. ‘Now, would you like to use the bathroom?’

I nod and she takes me through a big living room and up a staircase that goes round and round to where there’s a bathroom. The room next to it is a bedroom and the door is open so I can see there’s suitcases stacked on the floor at the bottom of the bed. She waits for me outside and then we go back down to the kitchen.

‘Sit here, child.’ Dorothy pulls a chair out from the end of the table. ‘What would you like? Would you like cookies and milk?’

‘Yes please.’ Dorothy puts a glass of milk and three chocolate chip biscuits in front of me. I realise how hungry I am and I gobble them down quickly. It’s only when I’m picking up the crumbs on my wet finger I see I’m alone in the room. I feel very strange, sitting at this great big table in such a great big house, like I’m the princess in one of the Grimms’ fairy-tale books at home. I start crying then, I feel so strange and lonely. The fat tears get mixed together with the crumbs on the plate.

Dorothy’s back. Because my eyes are full of water the red of her blouse grows down and sideways. I blink and she goes back to normal.

‘Now then. Child, child, what’s the matter?’

‘I didn’t know where anyone was.’

She sticks her hands up in the air. ‘Lord. What a girl. I was just getting a bed ready for you. Now there’s no need for this, is there? Everything will come out A-OK in the end.’

‘Will it?’

She nods. ‘Sure it will. Let’s get you into your bed. In the morning, you’ll feel much better. Everyone always does. Now,’ she puts her hands on her hips, ‘there’s only one bedroom in this apartment, and that’s where me and your grandpa sleep. So, I’ve found a bed for you in the other part of the house. It’s not done nice and new like this part, but it’ll have to do for now. Thank the Lord they gave us the keys for us to keep an eye on it.’ She winks at me.

We go back to the hallway with the bare bulb again. I follow her up the big wooden stairs that our feet clatter on and the echoes go up into the ceiling. At the top of the stairs she unlocks a door to a long corridor with lots of doors. She’s holding a candle which is just as well because it starts getting dark the further down it we go. First she shows me a toilet I can use that has a wood seat and an old-fashioned chain. Then she opens the door next to it.

‘This is your room, in here.’ Inside is nearly empty — just a bed with sheets and blankets and an old chair by the window.

‘There is no electricity in this part of the house,’ she says. ‘Here, I have found one of my petticoats for you to sleep in.’

I look at the bed. ‘Dorothy, am I allowed in here?’ It doesn’t look like anyone’s slept in this room for about a hundred years. And the way it was locked up, it feels like we shouldn’t be here at all.

‘I won’t tell if you don’t,’ she winks again.

I don’t want to change while she’s standing there. So I sit on the bed and hold the petticoat in my hand. Then I hear behind my back her going out and the door shutting — clunk . So quick, quick I change into the petticoat, which is white and has frills around the bottom. The door opens again.

‘Are you ready, Carmel?’

‘Yes.’

The petticoat’s so long I nearly fall over it as I take my clothes over to the chair. But Dorothy just laughs. ‘Here — we must make it fit you.’ And she ties the shoulder strings up into bows so it only comes down to my feet and doesn’t trip me up like before. She tucks me in and I’m about to ask her to stay but then I hear the door closing. It’s so dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face, even.

‘Goodnight Mummy. I’m sorry for everything,’ I say, although I never call her Mummy now. And I can hear Dorothy’s footsteps getting further and further away and I shout out quickly in a panicking sort of voice.

‘Dorothy, don’t go. Please come back.’

The door opens so the light comes through in a slice.

‘What is it, child? Are you afraid?’

‘Yes.’ I’m glad she’s said it and I don’t have to explain.

‘Would you like me to sit on your bed awhile?’

‘Oh, yes. Yes please.’

The bed’s creaky and old so it makes a noise when she sits on it. She puts her candle down and holds my hand and strokes it with one of her thumbs.

‘When I was a child I was often afraid.’

The voice she uses is like she’s going to tell me a story. I hope she does, it would take my mind off everything. When she doesn’t say anything for a while I ask, ‘What of?’

She’s quiet for a bit. ‘Things that moved too quickly. My mother said I had bad nerves.’

‘Oh.’

‘So I understand what it is to be afraid. You must have courage, Carmel.’

And her saying this and sounding like Mum makes me feel a tiny bit better and I can’t hold off any longer and start feeling myself going into sleep.

When I wake up in the night she’s gone. The thick blankets on top of me aren’t light and soft like my duvet at home, they’re heavy so they push my legs into the bed. It’s cold. But not inside the bed — that’s steamy and warm like the sheets weren’t dry enough when Dorothy put them on.

I feel achy and tired all over — even my brain. There’s a little bit of morning in the window and I roll over and watch it growing because it helps. I try to understand everything that’s happened. But then I give up. Sometimes, it’s easier to think of things as stories — not real, even. I’ve practised it before — when Dad went away, and another time when two bullies at school were saying words to me — words like ‘wanker’ and ‘weirdo’ that shot out of their mouths like dirty spit. If I made these things into stories I could float away from them, and look at them sideways, or like they were happening inside a snow globe.

All the same, I can’t stop pictures flashing up in my mind. The main one — my grandfather’s face as he unlocked the metal gates, turning to look at me as if he was checking I was still there. I remember how he looks exactly like the man in my picture, his white hair bright in the car lights and his pale owl eyes with their little specs. It seems a million years ago I did that drawing — even though it was only yesterday. I wonder about the rabbit in the picture, listening at his feet, and I wonder who the rabbit is and why he’s there. And then just before I go to sleep again I have a very odd thought. It’s that I know who the rabbit is, and the rabbit is me.