RED
The coat is the colour of a stop light bleeding out on wet streets. It’s a colour made to be seen in the middle of February when the snow has turned into slush and you’ve gone so many days without sunlight that everything seems distilled into a uniform blandness. It’s a colour that calls.
I’m acutely aware of this as I descend into the metro, and the red squawks insolently against the grey-green gloom of the underground.
My grandmother gave me the coat. It was hers, from a time when she prowled the great cities of the world, singing jazz, hunting with Persian nobles and rejecting marriage offers from American dry goods millionaires. Or so she claims, anyway. If it ever happened, that was a lifetime and a half ago. Now she’s withered into a cranky old lady who depends on me to bring her food, mow the lawn and nod complacently as she rants about my comprehensively terrible life choices. I think about her, past the metro station and beyond the forest of tracks. My old grandmother, lying in her bed, waiting.
And annoyance overtakes me. I could be in my own apartment right now. Instead, I’m cold, tired and hungry, taking the last train to her and hoping I can pick up something on the way that she won’t spend fifteen minutes bitching about. But then as it always does, guilt chases away my irritation. One day she will die, and you will no longer have the luxury to feel the resentment you do now. I let out a sigh and look around.
The platform is still sprinkled with a few late-night passengers. A couple sits whispering quietly on one of the iron benches. A bunch of cheerfully drunk teenagers debate getting out and hailing a taxi instead. And a lone woman, illuminated a sickly grey from the light of her cellphone. She has a weak and scrubbed-down look, as if she would crumple up if anyone so much as breathed on her. Suddenly, she looks up to see me staring and I’m mortified enough to turn around and start studying the map of the metro behind me. I’m pretending to memorize the entire network, from Bridgegate to Old Pagoda when I hear him.
“Sorry?”
“Umm, I just wanted to know if this is the right platform to get to Fourpenny Cross?”
He’s travelling alone. The oversized jacket draped on his stocky frame looks knobbly, and the colour is faded in spots, as if splashed with bleach. His voice doesn’t seem to go with the rest of him, it’s bright and loud.
“The fastest way is from Diva Junction,” I tell him, “but that’s two stations past and you’ve just missed the last train from that direction.” Then I pause and make up my mind.
“But you can also get there from Bas-Mesnil. I’m going that way, I can point it out to you if you like.”
“Gosh, thanks, that’d be amazing!” He smiles, and his teeth are as big and bright as his voice.
When the train arrives, the man follows me. The carriage is empty, except for the couple from the bench who don’t bother sitting down but latch on to the pole instead and continue their whispers. The man ignores the empty seats and unfolds his body on the one next to mine.
“So, what’s a nice little girl like you doing out so late?” he asks, pressing just a bit closer to me than politeness would allow. In the artificial intimacy created by our exchange, his voice has changed. There’s an oily, brash edge to the brightness now. I mumble something about evening classes and slow trains.
“Hope you have someone waiting for you at home then,” he says, switching on the smile again. When I say nothing, it slopes into a smirk. And then he looks into my eyes, spreads his legs out and starts to rub his knee back and forth against mine. I glance at the couple, wondering if they noticed, but they’re locked in their own universe. He follows my gaze and smiles wider, daring me to make a scene.
Just as his hand starts to scuttle across my thigh, I shift gingerly and put some space between us, fish out my headphones and in the universal sign of “leave-me-the-fuck-alone”, put them on. This delights him even more, of course. When I glance out of the corner of my eye, he is still looking at me, his smile sharp and shiny.
For the rest of the ride, I watch, I listen.
By the time the train pulls into Bas-Mesnil, it’s already close to 3 AM. I throw a few looks over my shoulder as I walk out of the station, but the man makes no attempt to follow me. Was I wrong about him?
My grandmother lives not far from the station, in a violently suburban neighbourhood peppered with other old people like her. I’m walking down a deserted side street, steeling myself for her inevitable complaints when I hear that voice again, big, bright and sharp.
“Hey… hey, wait up!”
He huffs and puffs dramatically as he reaches me and before I can ask, explains how worried he was about me. “A girl all alone, this time of night, that’s inviting trouble.” He accentuates the “all alone” with a flash of bright teeth. “Let me walk you home.”
“No thank you,” I say curtly. “I’ll be fine, I’m just a few doors away.”
His voice gets an edge of anger. “Jeez, I was just trying to be a gentleman. It’s dangerous at night, do you even understand? Are you always this ungrateful?” When I stay silent, his fury mounts. “I was just being nice.” And he lunges at me.
I wasn’t wrong.
I break into a run and the red coat flares out like a fox’s tail behind me – he’ll know exactly where I’m going. Without a word, he chases after me, the sound of his feet exploding on the pavement. He isn’t huffing and puffing anymore.
I run on through the empty alleys. In the darkness of the night the bland, interchangeable rows of houses look ominous, their windows like hollow eyes. No one comes out to help.
At last I burst through the front door of my grandmother’s house. She never locks it, she doesn’t need to. Behind me the man’s footsteps peter out. As he crosses the threshold, I can smell his confusion, and underneath that, a slowly unfurling fear.
He doesn’t see me in the darkness of the parlour, the door to my grandmother’s bedroom has caught his eye. It is ajar, and a blade of light shines out. His footsteps have a tinny, nervous quality to them as he enters the room, despite himself.
And sees my grandmother. My old grandmother, lying in her bed, waiting.
Her claws out, her fangs bared.
I can still hear his thoughts as they leak out through the sliver of open door, the brashness long shriveled up and strangled by an animal panic. With his last lucid breath, his mind calls out for his mother, and I almost feel sorry for him.
Eventually, the sounds stop, the door widens with a creak and my grandmother hobbles out.
“Well, that one did not want to go gently into the good night.”
“Oh come off it Nana, you have such big teeth, he was no match.”
She chuckles indulgently, reassured by my words. Then she demands sharply, “No one saw him with you?”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes at her. Has she forgotten how many times I have done this? “No, no one saw me Nana,” I sigh. “I was careful.”
“Come along then,” she growls, not unkindly, “saved you some. You’re all skin and bones.” She shuffles off, muttering under her breath about kids today.
I follow her, pausing only to hang up my coat, the colour of a man bleeding out on a floor.