Free The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer

by the window.
    ‘There is no electricity in this part of the house,’ she says. ‘Here, I have found one of my petticoats for you to sleep in.’
    I look at the bed. ‘Dorothy, am I allowed in here?’ It doesn’t look like anyone’s slept in this room for about a hundred years. And the way it was locked up, it feels like we shouldn’t be here at all.
    ‘I won’t tell if you don’t,’ she winks again.
    I don’t want to change while she’s standing there. So I sit on the bed and hold the petticoat in my hand. Then I hear behind my back her going out and the door shutting – clunk . So quick, quick I change into the petticoat, which is white and has frills around the bottom. The door opens again.
    ‘Are you ready, Carmel?’
    ‘Yes.’
    The petticoat’s so long I nearly fall over it as I take my clothes over to the chair. But Dorothy just laughs. ‘Here – we must make it fit you.’ And she ties the shoulder strings up into bows so it only comes down to my feet and doesn’t trip me up like before. She tucks me in and I’m about to ask her to stay but then I hear the door closing. It’s so dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face, even.
    ‘Goodnight Mummy. I’m sorry for everything,’ I say, although I never call her Mummy now. And I can hear Dorothy’s footsteps getting further and further away and I shout out quickly in a panicking sort of voice.
    ‘Dorothy, don’t go. Please come back.’
    The door opens so the light comes through in a slice.
    ‘What is it, child? Are you afraid?’
    ‘Yes.’ I’m glad she’s said it and I don’t have to explain.
    ‘Would you like me to sit on your bed awhile?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Yes please.’
    The bed’s creaky and old so it makes a noise when she sits on it. She puts her candle down and holds my hand and strokes it with one of her thumbs.
    ‘When I was a child I was often afraid.’
    The voice she uses is like she’s going to tell me a story. I hope she does, it would take my mind off everything. When she doesn’t say anything for a while I ask, ‘What of?’
    She’s quiet for a bit. ‘Things that moved too quickly. My mother said I had bad nerves.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘So I understand what it is to be afraid. You must have courage, Carmel.’
    And her saying this and sounding like Mum makes me feel a tiny bit better and I can’t hold off any longer and start feeling myself going into sleep.
    When I wake up in the night she’s gone. The thick blankets on top of me aren’t light and soft like my duvet at home, they’re heavy so they push my legs into the bed. It’s cold. But not inside the bed – that’s steamy and warm like the sheets weren’t dry enough when Dorothy put them on.
    I feel achy and tired all over – even my brain. There’s a little bit of morning in the window and I roll over and watch it growing because it helps. I try to understand everything that’s happened. But then I give up. Sometimes, it’s easier to think of things as stories – not real, even. I’ve practised it before – when Dad went away, and another time when two bullies at school were saying words to me – words like ‘wanker’ and ‘weirdo’ that shot out of their mouths like dirty spit. If I made these things into stories I could float away from them, and look at them sideways, or like they were happening inside a snow globe.
    All the same, I can’t stop pictures flashing up in my mind. The main one – my grandfather’s face as he unlocked the metal gates, turning to look at me as if he was checking I was still there. I remember how he looks exactly like the man in my picture, his white hair bright in the car lights and his pale owl eyes with their little specs. It seems a million years ago I did that drawing – even though it was only yesterday. I wonder about the rabbit in the picture, listening at his feet, and I wonder who the rabbit is and why he’s there. And then just before I go to sleep again I have a very odd thought. It’s that I