Kate Hamer - The Girl in the Red Coat

I took them inside and tried to invoke my mantra to calm myself down — open the cupboard door, teapot out, lift the kettle with your hand, drop the bags into the pot … Maria was introducing herself in quiet tones behind my back.

Why did we argue? It seemed so ridiculous, irrelevant now in the face of this, this rending of the earth. They’d disapproved of Paul, called him a useless tinker to his face. I’d given up the idea of university to go off with him, set up our business, start a life. I was an only child too, maybe that played its part? They were more than disappointed, they were furious, acting as if Paul was some powerful Svengali who’d mesmerised me. I invited them to the wedding. My mother phoned and asked, why wasn’t it Catholic? But even if it was, they wouldn’t be coming anyway. Not to see me marrying him. Finally, after Carmel was born, even our phone exchanges fizzled out so they hadn’t seen her since she was a baby. Paul gently aided me in this, I could see later. It must have been a relief to him, this cutting of the ties. They’d been so awful to him, putting down the phone if he answered, even — who could blame him? Later, I wondered if it had had a bearing on our marriage ending. If maybe the fissure hadn’t gone away at all but ran through our lives, deep buried, black. Paul had told me a few days before he left it was a blessed relief to him, to be with Lucy and no one disapproving or disappointed.

I made the tea and Maria left us alone to sit around the table like three strangers, which we were. They’d had to fly back from Spain and their faces looked wide-eyed with shock behind their cheerful suntans.

‘This is a terrible business. Terrible.’ My father frowned. ‘What can be done about it? What?’ Nobody answered and he fell silent.

Mum put out her hand and placed it on my arm; I saw the liver spots on her skin. ‘I’ve seen her picture in the papers. I’ve got a photograph of my mother as a child, all ringlets and great big eyes, and I couldn’t believe how alike they look. She’s beautiful, Beth. So lovely and innocent. Who would want to do a thing like this?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly. ‘I don’t know.’

My father still looked angry. ‘And what’s that husband of yours about now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s he up to? Where is he?’

‘Dad, Paul left me, about a year ago. He left me for another woman.’ I let them absorb the information. Was it me, or did I detect a smirk on my father’s face, a certain ‘I told you so’ in the jut of his small grey beard?

‘Oh, Beth.’ My mother’s cool hand reached out again.

‘I don’t care any more. I really don’t — all I care about is getting Carmel back. Everything else is … nonsense. The fact that Paul left me is nothing, absolutely nothing.’ I trailed off.

‘Anyway, maybe it was for the best …?’ my mother murmured.

I leapt to my feet; amazed they could be dwelling on this past history, even now.

‘I’ve lost my daughter,’ I bellowed across the tea things at them, ‘do you not know that?’

My father buried his face in his hands and started sobbing.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, Dad, but I can’t have you alienating Paul. He may not be my husband any more but he’s still Carmel’s dad and she needs both her parents.’ I moved over to my father, who was still weeping, and I put my hand on his arm. ‘It’s OK, Dad. Listen, they’re out, they’re out looking now. You mustn’t say anything to anyone — there’s been a sighting. A girl — in red — looking out of a window. The woman said, she said she looked like Carmel and she looked lost. They’re taking her back there — right now. As we speak.’

Excitement was gathering inside of me. I knew it was tenuous but this one somehow felt real. I could picture her — dreamy and lost, staring through a sash window. Shadows on her face.

Maria appeared behind us. She’d been listening all along, I could tell. ‘It’s going to take a while, Beth. This lady is quite elderly. She’s frail and … well, I’m afraid slightly wandering in the mind. I’m sorry, they’re going to wait till six o’clock when her daughter can go with her. They’re going to have to retrace her walk and knock on every door.’

*

Later, I could bear it no longer. They didn’t want me to go but I told them I needed to get some fresh air, to phone me as soon as they heard anything.

Except I knew it wasn’t fresh air I wanted but to be looking, looking, looking. Under stones, in rain barrels, in sheds or barns, down behind shop counters. I slipped out of the side gate mad with the desire to look. I imagined in my fever she might have shrunk to the size of a tiny red charm, small enough to hang on a Christmas tree, or on a bracelet. That’s why I couldn’t find her. She’d fallen without me noticing and now I’d have to search in holes in trees and in the cracks in the ground. I’d have to put my ear right onto the earth and listen for her calls no bigger than a mouse’s squeak.

Out in the countryside I jumped over a low stone wall into a field of corn and walked, the green tips brushing against my fingers as I parted them to look on the ground beneath, like a hunting dog, moving my head from side to side looking: for a foot; a stray bead or hair; for that flash of red. It didn’t feel useless in that moment, it felt like I was on a mission, that there was a purpose to this search. But when I reached the corner of the field and scrambled up so I was standing on top of the wall, the scale of my task dawned on me. I gazed over field after field, each one the same as this, extending out into the horizon as far as my eye could see.

I looked at my phone: nothing. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air.

‘Where are you?’ I screamed across the empty fields. ‘Where are you?’

*

By day 30 we were a family again — me, Mum, Dad. They stayed with me, bringing carrier bags of supermarket food. Dad repainted the front fence; I told him not to, but he said he felt better with something to do. How ridiculous our feud felt now.

‘Stop looking,’ they told me as I left the house with my coat on.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

The girl at the window never was Carmel. They found her, but it was the granddaughter of the people who lived there. And it was a red dressing gown she’d been wearing, not a coat.

That day I searched the woods. By now I was as exhausted as the princess who was made to dance, over hill and dale, by her slippers. The ones she couldn’t take off. It was starting to get dark by the time I lay down next to a stream, pushing my face into the ground, not sitting up even to spit the gritty grains of earth from my mouth.

I lay there for a long time. So long, it seemed, that things turned from dark to light. Slowly, beams descended and soft silver light filtered through the trees. The silvery light reminded me of something and while my mind was groping towards the memory I was distracted by a humming. I lifted my head — there was a child across the other side of the stream. She was sitting, throwing pebbles into the water — each one tinkled as it fell — and I wondered what she was doing here in this isolated spot, what her parents were thinking letting her stray so far and all alone. And as I watched there was a slow dawning realisation. This little girl wasn’t a stranger, I knew her. It was Carmel. It was my daughter.

I sat up.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she sniffed, and threw another stone.

I wanted to laugh then, at her being so sniffy, because relief was flooding into my bones like the most health-giving balm possible, an elixir.

‘Carmel, where have you been all this time, my love?’

She stood up. She wasn’t wearing her duffel coat but a little red jacket over a white dress, and the jacket was stitched with discs that shone out ruby red in the silver light. ‘I’m not too sure. You lost me,’ she said, and threw another stone into the water. ‘You lost me as if I was nothing but a bead. Or a ten-pence piece. You kept taking me to places where it could happen. You were doing it on purpose.’ More stones plinked into the stream.