Kate Hamer - The Girl in the Red Coat

DAY 2

I fell asleep for about an hour, sitting on the sofa with my head tilted sideways on a cushion. God knows how I managed it, but then it wasn’t really like sleep. Sleeping should be forgetting and I didn’t forget at all. Not when I was asleep or when I woke up. I felt gratitude I’d been spared at least the terrible painful jolt of remembering.

When I opened my eyes the police liaison officer — Sophie — was sitting in exactly the same place, on an opposite chair, reading texts on her phone. She looked neat and tidy despite being up through the night; her blond bun hadn’t come loose, even a little bit.

‘Hello,’ she said.

I threw off the blanket and swung my feet to the floor. ‘Any … any news?’ I asked, my breath coming quick and fast.

‘Not yet.’ She leaned over and briefly touched my arm and went to fill the kettle.

Then I was suffused with a kind of pain I’d never experienced before. It ran through me, as if I was made of fibre-optic wires, flowing into my hands, my throat, everywhere. I sat for a few moments, wondering how it was possible to function with such pain and dread.

Stand up, I told myself and amazingly my body obeyed.

Behind me I could hear Sophie filling the kettle, pouring milk. I went to the back door to breathe in some fresh air. The fog from yesterday had lifted completely. It was early, but already it was the most glorious sunlit morning. The tree shone with drops of dew and a scented steam rose from the grass as the sun dried it out. It seemed incredible to me that the world had turned once again on its axis and carried on as if not one thing had happened : the sun had risen and the birds were singing and bees and insects were busy buzzing away in the trees and grass.

On the washing line were the clothes I’d hung out the morning before, just before we’d left to catch the train. Carmel’s striped pyjamas, her T-shirts and a row of her knickers — candy pink, white and yellow — danced about in the breeze. My head hurt, the sunlight sliced bright curved beams into my eyes and the clothes seemed to perform a jig in the wind — where’s Carmel? they mocked. Have you lost her? Is she gone? Have you lost her? Wha-hee.

A wave of nausea engulfed me and I doubled over, there by the back door. There was a startled shout and the sound of the kettle banging down and Sophie was beside me and one arm was going round my back and the other one cradled my head and she gently, gently helped me to stand up again.

She looked out into the garden. ‘Shall I get those things in?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll help you.’

When I wake up for the second time it’s properly light but I’ve got trouble remembering where I am. I blink a lot on purpose which is the trick I do when I want to wake myself up properly.

The room is huge with a high ceiling and bare floorboards, like I’m ill and in an old-fashioned hospital except my bed’s the only one in here. There’s no curtains and the sun shines right onto me and feels warm on my face. On the windowsill there’s a lot of dust and black bits mixed in with chunks from the ceiling fallen onto it.

Bits of yesterday start to come back to me in flashes. But they’re jumbled up: the black-and-green shiny face looking down at me; the man with owl eyes jumping up out of nowhere; the long dark time in the car; the giant book; Mum on the train saying ‘nearly there, nearly there’; biting into a hot dog and snapping off the head of a long red worm of ketchup.

Mum’s brown boots sticking out from under a truck.

I don’t need to blink any more when I remember that. I sit up straight and a scream comes out of me I didn’t even try to make. It jumps out of me like a sneeze does.

The scream goes, ‘Oh no, no.’ And the sound flies up into the air and bounces around the ceiling. My legs kick up and down and the horrible thick blankets fall onto the floor in a lump and I jump right out of bed in one go. Footsteps come running down the corridor and Dorothy rushes in. She looks even darker in the daylight, like an Indian and with the same dusty black skirt as yesterday that comes down nearly to her ankles. Today, there’s a blue blouse tucked into it and a wide leather belt round her waist. Her hair is in a straight ponytail that goes right down her back and she reminds me of a woman in a cowboy film I once saw.

‘Now, now. There’s no need for that noise,’ she says. Though really I stopped screaming when she came in, I’m so glad to see her.

She starts picking up the blankets off the floor and folding them tidily. She’s very quick and neat doing this. Then I hear more footsteps and they don’t sound quite right. They go clump, clump and on the second clump there’s a dragging sound.

‘Thank the Lord, there’s Dennis,’ Dorothy says and my grandad appears in the doorway. His sleeves are rolled up and he’s sweating on his face like he’s been working in the garden or something.

‘I want to talk to my mummy,’ I say. I’m clenching my fists without even meaning to.

Grandad walks towards me and I see now what’s been making the dragging noise. There’s something wrong with one of his legs and he has trouble lifting it properly off the ground, so it scrapes across the wooden floor when he walks. He wasn’t doing that yesterday, not when we were running to the car or when he was unlocking the gates. And I know it was that sparkly energy that had somehow stopped him limping for a while. I don’t know how I know, but I just do.

His big pale eyes are on me and I feel hot and strange standing there in Dorothy’s see-through petticoat.

‘I want to talk to Mum,’ I say in a quieter voice, which feels fluttery like there’s butterflies in my mouth.

He scrunches down on the floor in front of me which I can see is hard for him because his leg hurts. Then his face is right in front of mine.

‘Of course you do, Carmel, but you must remember it’s important to stay as calm as we can. We need to be very grown up and calm for your mummy.’

I think about this for a minute and see it’s true, and I feel a tiny bit better.

‘You get dressed, and I’ll go and phone the hospital to find out the news,’ he says. He gets up and I can see it hurts again.

Him and Dorothy are standing round me, like I’m going to run off any minute, looking at me to see what I’ll say.

‘Alright,’ I say.

I stand by my clothes on the chair and wait for them to go so I can get dressed. I’m looking out of the window at trees when I hear the door close behind me.

I can see now that the black bits on the windowsill are the crispy bodies of dead wasps. They’re dried up and their thin spidery legs are bunched and pointing up to the ceiling. When they were alive they must have been more heavy: like the bee who escaped from my window and dipped down so low when he was flying out I thought he was going to crash. Now these wasps are dead all the heaviness has gone out of them and I think — how strange that being alive seems to make you heavy.

My clothes from the day before feel thick and dirty in my hands. But I put them on anyway, even my knickers. Even though my mum says, ‘Always start the day with clean knickers.’ I realise I don’t even have a toothbrush to brush my teeth with and decide to ask Dorothy if she has a spare one and hope she won’t suggest using one of theirs because using other people’s toothbrushes is gross.

Outside my room there’s the long corridor that’s painted green to halfway up the wall and then dirty white above. I follow the way I’ve heard their voices go till I’m at the top of the wooden stairs again. Down below the front door is wide open and outside there’s a stripe of blue sky above the metal gates. The sky looks the same as it always does — like it’s another normal day — and that’s a relief.