The Girl in the Red Coat - Couverture rigide

I DREAM ABOUT CARMEL OFTEN. In my dreams she's always walking backwards.
 
The day she was born there was snow on the ground. A silvery light arced through the window
as I held her in my arms.
 
As she grew up I nicknamed her ‘my little hedge child.' I couldn't imagine her living
anywhere but the countryside. Her thick curly hair stood out like a spray of breaking glass, or a
dandelion head.
 
'You look like you've been dragged through a hedge backwards,' I'd say to her.
 
And she would smile. Her eyes would close and flutter. The pale purple-veined lids like butterflies
sealing each eye.
 
‘I can imagine that,' she'd say finally, licking her lips.
 
I'm looking out of the window and I can almost see her - in those tights that made cherry licorice
of her legs - walking up the lane to school. The missing her feels like my throat has been removed.
 
Tonight I’ll dream of her again, I can feel it. I can feel her in the twilight, sitting up on the
skeined branches of the beech tree and calling out. But at night in my sleep she'll be walking
backwards toward the house - or is it away? – so she never gets closer.
 
Her clothes were often an untidy riot. The crotch of her winter tights bowed down between
her knees so she'd walk like a penguin. Her school collar would stick up on one side and be
buried in her jumper on the other. But her mind was a different matter - she knew what people
were feeling. When Sally's husband left her, Sally sat in my kitchen drinking tequila as I tried to
console her. Salt and lime and liquor for a husband. Carmel came past and made her fingers
into little sticks that she stuck into Sally's thick brown hair and massaged her scalp. Sally
moaned and dropped her head backwards.
 
‘Oh my God, Carmel, where did you learn to do that?'
 
'Hush, nowhere,' she whispered, kneading away.
 
That was just before she disappeared into the fog.
 
Christmas 1999. The children's cheeks blotched pink with cold and excitement as they hurried
through the school gates. To me, they all looked like little trolls compared to Carmel. I wondered
then if every parent had such thoughts. We had to walk home through the country lanes and
already it was nearly dark.
 
It was cold as we started off and snow edged the road. It glowed in the twilight and marked
our way. I realised I was balling my hands in tight fists inside my pockets with worries about
Christmas and no money. As I drew my hands out into the cold air and uncurled them Carmel fell
back and I could hear her grumbling behind me.
 
‘Do hurry up,' I said, anxious to get home out of the freezing night.
 
‘You realise. Mum, that I won't always be with you,' she said, her voice small and breathy in the
fading light.
 
Maybe my heart should have frozen then. Maybe I should have turned and gathered her up
and taken her home. Kept her shut away in a fortress or a tower. Locked with a golden key
that I would swallow, so my stomach would have to be cut open before she could be found. But of
course I thought it meant nothing, nothing at all.
 
'Well, you're with me for now.'
 
I turned. She seemed far behind me. The shape of her head was the same as the tussocky tops of
the hedges that closed in on either side.
'Carmel?'
 
A long plume of delicate ice breath brushed past my coat sleeve.
 
'I'm here.'
 
Sometimes I wonder if when I'm dead I'm destined to be looking still. Turned into an owl
and flying over the fields at night, swooping over crouching hedges and dark lanes. The smoke
from chimneys billowing and swaying from the movement of my wings as I pass through. Or will
I sit with her, high up in the beech tree, playing games? Spying on the people who live in our
house and watching their comings and goings. Maybe we'll call out to them and make them
jump.
 
We were single mothers, almost to a man – as one of the group once joked. We clustered
together in solidarity of our status. I think now maybe it was not good for Carmel, this band of
women with bitter fire glinting from their eyes and rings. Many evenings we'd be around the
kitchen table and it would be then he, then he, then he. We were all hurt in some way, bruised
inside. Except for Alice who had red bruises. After Carmel had gone - oh, a few months or so -
Alice came to the house.
 
'I had to speak to you,' she said. 'I need to tell you something.' Still I imagined anything could be a clue to the puzzle.
 
'What is it? What is it?' I asked, frantically clutching at the neck of my dressing gown. What
she told me disappointed me so much I turned my face away and looked at the empty shell of
the egg I'd eaten yesterday on the kitchen drainer. But when she started to tell me my
daughter had a channel to God and could be now at His right hand - how I hated her then. Her
false clues and her finding of Jesus, those wrists in identical braided bracelets turning as she
spoke. I could stay silent no longer.
 
'Stop it!' I yelled. 'Get out of here. I thought you had something real to tell me. Get out of this
house and leave me alone, you stupid cow. You crazy stupid cow. Take your God with you and
don't ever come back.'
 
Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, I imagine crawling inside the shell of Carmel's skull and
finding her memories there. Peering through her eye sockets and watching the film of her life
unfold through her eyes. Look, look: there's me and her father, when we were together. Carmel's
still small so to her we seem like giants, growing up into the sky. I lean down to pick her up and
empty nursery rhymes into her ear.
 
And there's that day out to the circus.
We have a picnic by the big top before we go in. I spread out the blanket on the grass, so I
don't notice Carmel turn her head and see the clown peering from between the tent flaps. His face has thick white make-up with a big red mouth shape drawn on. She puzzles why his head is so high up because his stilts are hidden by the striped tent flap. He looks briefly up at the sky to check the weather, then his red-and-white face disappears back inside.
 
What else? Starting school, me breaking up with Paul and throwing his clothes out of the
bedroom window. She must have seen them from where she was in the kitchen - his shirts and trousers sailing down. Other things, how many memories even in a short life: seeing the sea, a day paddling in the river, Christmas, a full moon, snow.
 
Always I stop at her eighth birthday and can go no farther. Her eighth birthday, when we went to
the maze.

An ELLE Lettres Readers' Prize Winner

“Kate Hamer’s gripping debut novel immediately recalls the explosion of similarly titled books and movies, from Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, to The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl ... What kicks The Girl in the Red Coat out of the loop of familiarity is Ms. Hamer’s keen understanding of her two central characters: Carmel and her devastated mother, Beth, who narrate alternating chapters ... Both emerge as individuals depicted with sympathy but also with unsparing emotional precision.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“This stunning debut...has the propulsion of a thriller.” —People

“Every sentence in Kate Hamer's debut is so perceptive that you're torn between wanting to linger on the thought and itching to learn what happens next...The taut plot alternates between Carmel's emotional struggle to survive and Beth's refusal to believe that her daughter is gone forever. Meanwhile, their complex yet unbreakable bond is rendered with honesty and love.”—Oprah.com

“Keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip . . . What’s most powerful here is not whodunit, or even why, but how this mother and daughter bear their separation, and the stories they tell themselves to help endure it.” —Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
 
“Hamer’s book is a moving, voice-driven narrative. As much an examination of loss and anxiety as it is a gripping page-turner, it’ll appeal to anyone captivated by child narrators or analyses of the pains and joys of motherhood.” —Huffington Post

“Riveting. Worth the hype.”—Book Riot

“Compulsively readable . . . Beautifully written and unpredictable . . . I had to stop myself racing to the end to find out what happened . . . Kate Hamer catches at the threads of what parents fear most—the abduction of a child—and weaves a disturbing and original story. There is menace in this book, lurking in the shadows on every page, but also innocence, love, and hope.” —Rosamund Lupton, author of Sisters
 
“Gripping and sensitive—beautifully written, The Girl in the Red Coat is a compulsive, aching story full of loss and redemption.” —Lisa Ballantyne, author of The Guilty One

“[A] spectacular debut ... Telling the story in two remarkable voices, with Beth’s chapters unfurling in past tense and Carmel’s in present tense, the author weaves a page-turning narrative. The trajectories of the novel’s two leads—through despair, hope, and redemption—are believable and nuanced, resulting in a morally complex, haunting read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Reading this novel is a test of how fast you can turn pages.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Hamer’s lush use of language easily conjures fairy-tale imagery, especially of dark forests and Little Red Riding Hood. Although a kidnapped child is the central plot point, this is not a mystery but a novel of deep inquiry and intense emotions. Hamer’s dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down and will spark much discussion.” —Booklist, starred review

“Poignantly details the loss and loneliness of a mother and daughter separated...Fast-paced ... Hamer beautifully renders pain, exactly capturing the evisceration of loss...Exquisite prose surrounding a mother and daughter torn apart.” —Kirkus Reviews