Kate Hamer: The Girl in the Red Coat

These days I don’t miss Dad’s shouting but I do miss his rumbling voice. But Mum says it’s just the two of us so we can do anything we want. She says, ‘We can be two nutters together.’ Sometimes we dance in the kitchen round the old wooden table. We turn the radio right up and use big spoons for microphones.

Right now, I don’t try and stop listening, like I did when Mum and Dad were arguing. It’s like I’m all ears and they stretch towards any tiny sound. I think of Mum right under my bed in the kitchen, sitting down and drinking her morning cuppa. It makes me laugh — that I’m seeing exactly what she’s doing in my mind and I’m lying right over her and she doesn’t even know. Then I hear a noise like someone’s humming in my room.

I look up and that’s when I see a bee at the top of my window. It’s buzzing more than humming now and I kneel up. It’s the biggest bee I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s got white bits on its fur like it’s an old man — or, as Mum would say, ‘in the winter of its life’. Every time it bounces against the window it makes an extra loud buzz like it’s getting angry. It doesn’t know about the glass in its way — it can’t understand why it can’t just fly out free into the garden. So, very carefully, because I know bees have a sting like a poison dart, I open up the window. It bumps against the glass once more and then flies out. At first I think it’s going to fall and crash onto the ground but it soars up into the air and away into the garden over the top of the apple tree.

I get dressed in my leggings and my favourite purple-and-red stripy T-shirt that feels so soft and lovely against my skin and it’s got long arms and I can feel the day in front of me. Before I go downstairs I decide to draw a picture of the storytelling festival. I find a piece of paper and draw with a thick pencil a man sitting down. He’s wearing glasses and I imagine the story he’s telling so I put scribbly words coming out of his mouth. Then I do a rabbit at his feet with its mouth open because it’s listening so hard.

Downstairs there’s a toast smell in the kitchen and Mum’s wearing jeans and a flowery top — she told me flowery tops are her ‘haute couture’ and I got her to write those words down because I want to put them in my word collection — and I ask, ‘Are we still going?’ Because you never can be sure.

She turns round and smiles at me. ‘Yes, Carmel, yes.’

DAY 1

We took the train that day. I wanted it to be special for Carmel and taking a train rather than the usual bus was a treat.

She had crazes for things then, like any kid. Passions that flared up and then fizzled and died as quickly as they came but her love for the colour red seemed to be enduring. I’d bought her a red duffel coat and that’s what she was wearing. She’d asked if she could have red shoes the next time she needed shoes and we’d seen a pair in the window of Clarks. We looked at them every time we went into town to check they were still there. My wages didn’t go far, but I figured I might be able to buy them before she returned to school after Easter and prayed they wouldn’t be sold before then. So far, miraculously, every time we went into town there they were — on a little green felt-covered stand, like two big fat ladybirds waiting on the grass — even though the rest of the stock changed around them. As she put on her coat that morning I made a decision.

‘Tomorrow, we’ll go into town and if those shoes are still there, we’ll buy them.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really.’

To hell with everything, I’d put them on my credit card and worry about it later. That morning with the spring wind blowing through the back door anything seemed possible. Perhaps I could even ask Paul to pay for them, now he’d made a reappearance. I’d felt he wanted the connection back with his daughter, even if he didn’t want anything to do with me. Perhaps it was time to accept the contribution he’d offered that I’d recklessly turned down, insisting that we’d manage without him.

That day on the train, for a while at least, the past got swept away by the spring, the sucking hot air from the trains as they speeded through the station and the excitement of a day out, just the two of us. I thought: I’ve been in such a state, such a terrible stupid anxious state this past year since Paul left. It’s time to stop it now. Time to start afresh.

Carmel sat opposite me bundled up in her duffel coat. The train was crowded. A tall young man with a dirty denim jacket and the tattoo of a spider’s web creeping up his neck from his open shirt got on and took the seat next to Carmel. He fiddled with his mobile phone for a while and then the guard looked at our tickets. I could see from the start the man in the denim jacket was desperate to begin a conversation. Words began to form in his mouth that he kept swallowing at the last minute, but after the ticket collecting he couldn’t hold back.

‘Good little girl you have.’ He was speaking to me.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ I smiled at him. It was peaceful and comfortable on the rocking train with Carmel right opposite me.

‘Day out, just the two of you?’

I nodded, then was it my imagination or did his sharp darting eyes glance at my ring finger? Though ridiculous that anyone should note such things these days — especially at his age.

‘Left the old fella at home?’

‘That’s right.’

Maybe it was just me conscious of my finger, as naked as a root, where less than a year ago a thick gold ring with a circle of silver flowers had gleamed. Either way I was relieved when he got off.

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ I said.

‘Who?’ asked Carmel, her mind clearly on other things.

‘Mr Spiderman, of course.’

She didn’t laugh at my silly name-calling, just patted my hand — once, lightly.

‘You nutter,’ she smiled, dreamily.

Then it was just the two of us again, sitting opposite each other. The train went through an avenue of trees. Carmel’s hair splayed out with static across the nylon headrest of the seat as she looked out of the window. As we passed through the trees they made a pattern so her face was one moment in bright sunlight and the next in darkness. This is the image I remember most from the day. Carmel’s face being stripped with light and dark, flickering on and off, like at the end of a spool of film when it’s about to run out.

Great flapping lines of flags are blowing upwards at the festival to the blue sky. While we’re queuing a woman dressed as a dragon walks up and down on stilts.

‘How do they walk?’ I ask my mum. ‘Can I have some stilts?’

I can imagine myself walking round the garden in them and being able to see right over the wall. Though I don’t tell Mum that bit.

‘They strap their legs up and have to practise a lot,’ Mum says.

The dragon goes past again, she looks down at me, and against the sun her golden face turns dark. She drapes her frilly dragon wings over me and I tip my head back so they can fall over my face and everything goes green and gold, then black. She walks on and I can see her bottom moving under her shiny tight green leggings. When a man dressed as a fly comes near I swap sides with Mum, in case he does the same, because I don’t really like the fly.

When we pay and get through Mum leans over me. ‘What d’you think?’

And I’m just nodding and nodding because I can’t say what I think except I love it. I love how everything seems weird, or too tall or upside down. That there’s people with sequins on their eyelids or dressed as bears and a giant book open on a page with the corner curling up — though when I touch it with my finger, it’s not paper but hard plastic. It’s like the place in Alice on the other side of the mirror, a place where I might be able to grow as high as one of the tents or talk to a cat. Mum’s explaining how in each tent there’s stories being told and when she says that I can feel words come shooting out of the tent doors and I just want to stand there at the openings and let them fizz on my brain.