The Doll Funeral - Couverture rigide

The Doll Funeral
1 CAKE

20 August 1983

I knew the moment that Mum called me something was going to happen. I heard it in her voice.

‘Ruby...’

The open eye of the hall mirror watched as I came downstairs humming a nervous tune, my yolk yellow birthday blouse done right up to the neck and my brown cord skirt flicking against a knee scab.

The light from the open kitchen doorway, where my parents waited, puddled onto the dirty carpet in the hall.

On the Formica table was the birthday cake. It had white icing, Smarties, and thirteen candles. A big triangle wedge had been cut out and the sharp carving knife lay close by, pointing into the gap.

I blinked. I’d expected punishment for some minor crime committed, a cup broken or left unwashed. The back door left open or closed or whichever way my father didn’t want it that day. But instead it seemed my mum and dad had turned into dolls or puppets: hard lines had appeared, running from their noses to their chins. Mum’s cheeks were blotched with anxious red paint, corkscrew curls exploding from her head. Dad was strung stiffly behind her in his grey felt jacket. His arm came up and swiped at his nose. Mum jiggled, her shoes clacking menacingly on the lino.

Her jaw opened. ‘Ruby. Now, we don’t want you to create a scene or start trouble but it’s time you knew.’

From behind her Dad said, in that furred up voice of someone who’s kept quiet for a bit, ‘Yes. Thirteen is old enough.’

On the cake between us, the Smarties had started to leak sharp colours—as if they were flies that had got trapped there and were now slowly bleeding to death.

‘Ruby, there’s something we’ve been keeping from you all these years,’ Mum said. She paused, then spoke in a rush. ‘It’s that you are not our natural child. We didn’t give birth to you.’

‘Which explains a lot—’

‘Stop it, just for this once, Mick. Leave the girl alone.’ She turned to me. ‘Ruby, you were adopted when you were four months old. You are not our child—d’you hear me?’ She turned. ‘Honestly, Mick, I don’t think she’s taking it in.’

But I was.

I ran into the garden and sang for joy.

The legs of the chair shrieked against the kitchen floor as I pushed it back and I burst through the kitchen door that led out into the garden. Outside, there was a thunderous sky and air the colour of dark butter. Beyond the garden, trees shaded the distance. I plunged into the waist-high grass with my arms outstretched to feel the feather tops of the grasses snaking under my palms. I glimpsed red, the corner of the toy ride-on plastic bus half embedded in the tangled growth, and the arm of a doll, its chubby fingers pointing straight up to a sky of seething grey scribble.

Tall spikes of evening primroses glowing the brightest yellow punched up from the grass as I waded to the middle where I stood and sniffed at the sweet dust of pollen on my hands. Then, arms raised, I started my song to the storm clouds.

‘There’s a brown girl in the ring...’ And it must have been my tenth or maybe twelfth time singing the verse when Mick’s voice crackled a cold path out from the back door.

‘Ruby. Stop that and get back in here, now.’

I dragged my feet all the way back up the path. Just inside the doorway his fist jumped out like a snake and cracked my head.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

I scuttled away and sat on the other side of the table, holding my head.

‘Dear, dear,’ Barbara muttered. ‘Dear God.’ She sat and folded her arms. ‘Ruby, you were only a tiny baby when you came to us,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to think of that now.’

‘So I was smaller than...’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly.

‘But not like her,’ said Mick.

Their daughter. Trudy. She died when she was three. Mick always called her ‘sweet pea’. When he got drunk he cried for her—big drops of tears slid down his face and dripped on his jacket.

‘No. You were a small...’ Barbara said. ‘But strong.’

‘A whiner,’ Mick interrupted. He was fiddling round with the gas stove now, so he had his back to us. He struck a match to light the flame under the kettle and the sulphur smell took to the air. Three quarters on from behind I could still see the quiff sticking out like a horn from his head.

‘Was I born here? Here in the forest, I mean?’ The idea I could have come from anywhere else seemed strange and improbable.

The Forest of Dean. Here we lived in one of a row of small stone cottages with trees stretching over us like children doing ghost impressions with their hands, surrounded by closed coal mines slowly getting zipped back up into the earth.

Barbara screwed up her eyes as if she was looking, trying to see me being born in the distance. She nodded, like she’d caught a glimpse of it. ‘Yes, you were.’

‘What about my name?’ I asked.

‘Flood is ours but Ruby was the name you came with,’ she said. ‘When you were little you thought it was because of...’

Without thinking my hand flew to the birthmark covering the left side of my face.

‘I know.’

Mick started picking Smarties off the cake, so Mum snatched it up and carried it to the sink.

‘Well, that’s over,’ she muttered, examining the pits the Smarties had left.

‘But, but...nothing else?’

‘No, not really.’ She let out a breathy sigh and the cake wobbled in her hands.

‘That’s all.’

‘Can I do my wish?’

‘You’ve had it already.’

‘I want to do it again. I’ve thought of something else.’

‘Go on then. Mick, give her the matches.’

Barbara set the cake back on the table and I arranged the yellow candles, their heads already bubbled from burning. I touched a match with its little ball of flame to each one and closed my eyes and wished and wished and wished. The twin stars of my real parents orbited my head, blinking on and off.

‘Come and get me,’ I whispered.

—

I found the Shadow on the stairs, his boy shape hunched over. He made way for me as I sat beside him and whispered, ‘Mick and Barbara are not my real mum and dad.’ The curled bones of his ear brushed against my lips and I thought I felt him shiver in excitement.

Then I shut myself in the bathroom and ran the bath so hot it gauzed the walls in steam. I imagined my real parents appearing to me through the white clouds. My mother looked like me but with an arctic sparkle of glamour. My father had the same crow’s wing hair as mine and a belted raincoat like the men wore in old films. I reached out to touch but my finger made them explode into a hundred droplets that fell in rain back into the bath, so I opened the tap to make more steam.

‘Come and find me,’ I begged again, hugging my wet knees to my chest.

‘Ruby.’ I wondered how long Mick had been behind the door, lurking. ‘You seem to be using an awful lot of hot water. That sounded like a fiver’s worth that just went in then.’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I called, holding my cheeks so he couldn’t hear my smile.

I’d always been a scavenger of small things. The glittering dust mote I reached up and tried to grab. The layers of shadow in the corner like piled clothes on a chair. Sliding my hands under rugs for what might be living there. Grubbing in the dirt for treasure.

But that night I became a proper hunter. Of true family. Of the threads that ghosts leave behind. A hunter of lost souls.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month

“Hamer has created a mystical world in which characters are haunted by specters of their present as well as their past, by the living and the lost. Her diction is lovely and tangible . . A powerful paranormal novel.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Hamer handles language beautifully, fashioning effortlessly evocative sentences.”
—BOOKLIST, starred review

“[Hamer’s] fascination with the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, sanity and insanity, chosen and blood families, and her subtle understanding of the clean, often disturbing logic of childhood morality, evoke both Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan . . . This is an elegiac and uplifting novel about the indissoluble bonds between mothers and daughters and a reminder of how the imagination can set you free.” —Melanie McGrath, THE GUARDIAN
 
“I felt instantly protective of Ruby; the teenager with a secret so chilling I had to check the front door was locked. Hamer’s brilliant storytelling made me read on for fear Ruby’s fate depended on it.” —Anna Silverman GRAZIA

“Hamer’s ability to conjure an atmosphere is certainly powerful. Particularly resonant is her portrait of the beauty and menace of the Forest of Dean.” —Rebecca Nicholson, THE SUNDAY TIMES
 
“What holds the novel together is the tremendous momentum of the story itself, which gathers pace with every page, hooking you into its strangeness and keeping you hooked to the very last word.” —Rebecca Abrams, FINANCIAL TIMES

"A moving and mesmeric story... beautifully written, The Doll Funeral brims with a delightful, riveting strangeness." SHELF AWARENESS, starred review

Praise for The Girl in the Red Coat

“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.” —Kim Hubbard, 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.” —Dawn Raffel, 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, The Guardian
  
“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

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