Kate Hamer - The Girl in the Red Coat

Now there’s feet shuffling towards the door and they both stand looking at me.

‘Carmel, child. Put the dishes down and come sit down.’ Dorothy says it kindly but for some reason this makes the prickles worse, so they’re running down my back in rivers.

I do as I’m told and Dorothy tidies the colouring things they’ve given me into a pile. Grandad sits at the head of the table in one of his black suits. Dorothy’s in her soft red blouse, the one she was wearing the night I came here. Both of their mouths are turning down at the corners. Grandad keeps fidgeting on his hard wooden chair and I can see his sparkly energy is back and it’s flying round the room and that’s what’s making him fidget so much.

‘Carmel. Dear, dear Carmel.’ Grandad wipes his hanky over his face and I’m getting scareder and scareder.

‘What? What is it?’ My voice rushes out of me like a little wind.

‘I’m afraid I only have bad news today, Carmel. Bad, terrible news,’ says Grandad, and my throat squeezes tight like he has his hands round it and he’s choking me half to death.

‘Mum?’ I whisper.

Grandad nods. I turn to Dorothy but she’s looking away.

‘I’m afraid so, Carmel. I’m afraid I’ve heard — and there’s no easy way to say this — that your mother died in the night.’

And even though I knew this was what they were going to say I jump up and scream, ‘No.’

‘Carmel, dear. You have to be calm. Listen …’

I won’t listen. My hands push at the table and I don’t know how — it’s so huge and heavy — but the legs screech across the floor and it smashes right into Dorothy’s ribs.

‘No, no, no.’

What can I do? I don’t know where to put myself, even. I run out of their apartment. Grandad shouts out, ‘No, child, listen,’ but I can’t stop — up and down the stairs. Bashing myself into the walls on purpose. Hitting my head with my own hands.

‘It can’t be true. It can’t be,’ I’m yelling down the big stairs. ‘I want to see her right now.’

Dorothy’s face is a floating blob below. ‘Please, child. It’s a terrible cross to bear but you must face it. We must face it together.’ She starts walking up the stairs with one hand out in front of her like I’m a squirrel she wants to feed.

And Dorothy saying it makes it really true. With Grandad you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next — blood of lambs, taking the B road — but Dorothy’s realer, like a mother or a teacher. When she says it, that’s it. I rush past her and she falls back against the wall, her eyes and mouth three round Os. Behind me I can hear their shouts and Grandad saying, ‘After her, Dorothy. After her.’ There’s Grandad’s slide, drag of his bad leg and then the thud of his good one. Dorothy’s quicker. I hear her patter and I imagine her bunching her long skirt up in her hands so she can run better.

But they’re no match for me. My terrible hurting pain’s like petrol so I’m a burning car tearing through the building, wailing as I go. Back up the stairs and past my bedroom, past rows of windows and a broken one where I’ve seen fast birds fly in and out of the hole — to a part I haven’t been before, a staircase with carved handles. At the top is a big brown door and it gives way with a whoosh like the sound of a fridge opening.

And I fall inside a room I just know has had no human being inside it for about a hundred years. There’s velvet-covered chairs bunched around the fireplace and when I fall in shrieking I feel them turn towards me, like real sitting people would do if someone came in wailing their head off. The thick red carpet swallows up the noise of my footsteps.

This room is the pain room, I think. This is the room of death. There’s black wallpaper covering the walls and in it I can see evil buds of pink flowers patterned over and over again — a thousand flesh eyes all looking.

‘My mother’s dead,’ I gasp at the room.

It freezes at first and doesn’t know what to say back.

‘She’s dead, she’s dead.’

I run in circles, pushing over wooden tables with pots of plants that died years ago and they crash to the floor and empty ashy stuff across the carpet. And after not knowing what to say, the room wakes up with a roar from being dead and frozen. It goes after me, chasing behind as I kick chairs and rip at old dirty velvet on the cushions with my teeth. I scrabble at the wallpaper with my nails but it’s so thick and glued on my fingernails slide across it.

‘You’re just furniture,’ I yell and start shredding and kicking again because I want to turn it into lumps. I’m knocking myself against heavy things and crying out for Mum: ‘Mum, Mum, Mum — don’t leave me here, don’t leave me here.’

The room’s half destroyed when I hear Dorothy and Grandad’s shouts. I’ve shredded it in five minutes flat after it staying the same — like a tail or an eye in a jar — for a hundred years, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to put every single wall eye out. There’s a mirror above the fireplace and I catch myself in it — panting and spitty — and I look so white and strange, with glittering eyes, I hardly know it’s me for a second.

As I fly out of the door Dorothy is lifting up her skirt and putting one foot, in her old-fashioned black lace-up shoe, on the bottom stair but I’m down and past her and she tries to grab me but misses. She looks up, with her mouth falling open, like I’m just a blurry ball of hair and teeth and skirts screaming by, then gone.

Outside I’m halfway through the garden when the electricity that’s been making me run lifts out of my body and I fall, panting and tired out, until I manage to lift up my head and see I’m outside the hobbit houses. A big plop of rain falls — and I’m so close it looks huge — and I watch it land on a leaf, wobble and shine, then drip down. I crawl to the hobbit house at the end. There’s a bench on the back wall but I curl up on the floor on the lumps of stone there and push the door closed with my feet. A spider twinkles over to me, stops for a second, then dances into my hair and I don’t even shake it out.

Slowly, the light goes greyer. There’s a patter of rain outside and puffs of fresh air that smell of green weeds come through the holes. ‘Mum,’ I gulp — and think I sound like a fish.

There’s a feeling I’ve got, an idea that won’t go away: that if I’d never found that flower death bud room, none of this would have happened. It doesn’t make sense because they told me about Mum before I’d even set foot inside but the feeling of that place is clinging to me like a gas that’s crept inside the holes in my skin. I tremble and cry for my old life: walks, Christmas, garden, you’re a right nutter, Mum’s friends drinking wine round the kitchen table, the kettle going on in the morning and Mrs Buckfast at the front of the class. Most of all though — the kind blue lights in Mum’s eyes.

I hear a tramping and one real amber eye appears and hangs outside, looking through a hole in the door like the moon.

‘Child, where have you been? We’ve been so anxious, so worried. What are you doing there, covered in dirt? You’ve been gone so long, we thought you’d vanished into thin air.’

I look at the talking eye but I’m just a frozen lump.

‘Dear, dear.’ I can hear Dorothy shuffling around, pushing against the door and panting, but I’m behind it so it won’t open.

The eye pops up again. ‘Child, you will have to move. I can’t budge the door. Oh my, this is very bad, a bad business.’

More heaving till she’s pushing so hard I’m being shoved like a stuffed snake that gets put on the backs of doors to stop the draught. Arms come round the door and a hand grabs my shoulder and I get shovelled out from my hidey-hole.