A Cupboard Full of Coats (12 page)

Normally, it would’ve been a real treat being there, but I felt awkward sitting opposite her. It had been easier not speaking while we were moving and the market was bustling around us, but now it was just us and the silence that came from my end and drowned out her attempts to make up.

Then out of the blue she just said it.

‘I shouldn’t have slapped you. It was wrong and I’m sorry. I was angry, but that doesn’t make it okay. I won’t do it again.’

For some weird reason my eyes filled with tears.

‘Jinxy, I know this is hard for you. I know that. You’ve had me to yourself nearly your whole life, and now you have to share. I understand that. But you have to try and understand as well. One day, you’re gonna leave…’

‘No I won’t.’

She smiled. ‘You will. You’ll grow up and fall in love with someone wonderful and you’ll want to be with them and you’ll go. Would you have me sitting on my own in that big old house, lonely and crying? No one to talk to, no one to laugh with, no one to hold me?’

I did understand, although the ‘hold me’ bit was embarrassing. I knew what she meant and I knew she wasn’t being unreasonable, but I still said, ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me what I can do that would make things okay for you.’

What came to my mind was:
Chuck him out! Tip his stuff into the street! Let him go be tired in some other woman’s house! Make everything as it was before!
I shrugged my shoulders and she sighed.

‘I love him,’ she said, when I had most wanted her to say she loved me. ‘I love him and he is a part of my life now…part of
our
lives. But it doesn’t change anything between us, me and you. I will always be here for you. Do you believe me?’

My throat was so choked I thought my voice would break. ‘Yes.’

She reached over the table and held my hand, squeezing it firmly enough to make me look at her, but not enough to hurt. ‘That is my promise to you for all time. I will always be here for you.’

‘I believe you,’ I said. She let go of my hand as our plates arrived. I wiped my eyes as though I was just flicking off a speck that had randomly landed on my lashes. ‘This looks good,’ I said and smiled at her. She returned the smile and we ate.

*

It was after seven by the time we returned back home. I was happy we’d gone out together, that we’d managed to sort things out. I was determined to try harder to be understanding of Berris even though I didn’t want him there, because she
did
want him there and she was my mum and he made her happy, and somehow I had to find a way to make the best of it.

But he was vexed.

He hardly looked at her when we came in. He was in the living room, just sitting on the settee, not playing music or watching TV. I wondered if he’d been standing at the window watching out for us coming down the street. He acted like we’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what that was. My mother didn’t know either, I could tell. She made light of it, pretending she hadn’t noticed his mood, kissing his cheek and making jokes like he was happy and joking back with her. When he looked at me, I saw something in his eyes that I understood, and it surprised me. It had been the first time since he’d moved in that she’d spent any time with me on my own, two or three hours on one occasion in nearly two months, that was all.

And he was jealous.

To me he was acting like a child who was angry with his friend for liking someone else as well. His lips were pursed, he wouldn’t meet her eyes or speak. He met mine though, and the message in them was clear: he was upset and it was my fault. I couldn’t do the chirpy acting my mum was styling out like she was aiming for an Oscar, and in the end, after all the complaining I’d done about the two of them going to bed early, I ended up leaving them in the living room, for the first time the first to go to bed. I said that I was tired and went upstairs to my room.

I lay in bed, on my back, a Mills & Boon propped open against my knees, and I would have been reading it if it had been possible to concentrate. But I couldn’t. I could hear them. Arguing. I couldn’t hear the details, but I could hear the pitch of their voices. His was angry. Accusing. Hers was placatory. Pleading. At some point I was sure she was crying.

I got off the bed and went over to the door, opening it slightly, still standing inside my room, able to hear a bit better, alarmed but unable to decide if I should go downstairs or stay in my room and carry on pretending I couldn’t hear a thing. Suddenly I heard my mum cry out, loudly, as if she’d been hurt. It went quiet then for what felt like a very long time and my indecision felt like a pressure building up inside me. I heard someone come up the stairs and go into the bathroom and close the door. The footsteps were hasty and clumsy.

Berris
.

I waited a few minutes longer, scared he would come straight back out and catch me, but he didn’t. Finally, I forced myself to move my feet and they carried me down the stairs.

I walked into the kitchen and, to my surprise, he was sitting there, at the table on his own, eating leftover Johnnycakes and saltfish; waxing it off.

He looked up at me in that strange way I was still getting used to, not actually meeting my eyes, just kind of focusing on me in bits; firstly my hair and then my breasts, then nodded in the direction of my feet before his eyes went back to his plate. I didn’t know whether he’d been greeting me, or if I’d just been dismissed.

There was something about him at that particular moment which disturbed me, but it was hard to put my finger on it exactly. It was as if he had a glow around him, not the visible one around the kids in the Ready Brek advert, more of an aura I couldn’t see but felt instead, something physical and static and scary. I didn’t like him, I knew that. But it wasn’t just dislike I felt, it was fear, the kind of fear you experienced passing a digi group of bullies when you were on your own. His eyes had that same look about them that I’d seen in the eyes of bullies, not just threatening, but smug too, like he knew something that gave him power over anyone who was weaker. It made me feel afraid.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked, looking around the kitchen, though it was obvious she wasn’t there.

‘Upstairs in her room,’ he said and he flicked his head towards the ceiling, like he was saying
Up there
and at the same time telling me he couldn’t care less. I waited for a second, but he didn’t look back up.

‘Thanks,’ I said, relieved to be leaving the room and more worried than I had been before I had entered.

She was still inside the bathroom and though the door was closed it was unlocked, so I tapped first and when she didn’t answer, opened it and saw her, bent over the sink with the cold tap running. She was splashing water on to her face.

‘Mum?’

She turned her head to look at me.

‘Oh my God,’ I said and she turned away quickly and started squeezing out the flannel in the sink, carefully folding it and gently dabbing at her face. I took a step closer, watching her movements through the mirror above the bowl. The left side of her face was bruised, from the eye – puffed up so bad it could hardly open – to the cheekbone. Against her pale skin, the bruising was a riot of colours, a deep maroon giving way to dark red giving way to crimson round the edges. And in the centre, a gash about an inch long bled.

‘It’s all right,’ she said in a chatty kind of tone, talking well fast, ‘it looks worse than it feels. Don’t start fretting, Jinx. I’m really fine.’

Downstairs the front door slammed. I assumed it was Berris, leaving. As if that was her cue, she sagged to her knees, covered her face with her hands and I stood dumbstruck beside my mother as she started to cry.

He’d done it. I knew in my stomach it was him, but when I tried to ask her about it she fobbed me off, and when I pushed it she started getting angry, so I ended up backing off and though it was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened in our house, we didn’t discuss it.

But even though I wasn’t putting my thoughts into words, I couldn’t get the questions out of my head. Like, what could make a big man like Berris punch my mother in the face? How could he have looked at my beautiful mum and done that, then calmly sat downstairs and eaten? From what I saw, she did everything he wanted, tried her hardest to be perfect for him. I could think of nothing she could’ve done or said that made sense of how he’d manhandled her.

Maybe she was right when she said I was too young to understand. Maybe that was true. But the way she cried, the level of her upset, I was sure she was no clearer on the answers to those questions than I was.

We stayed up together till late that night, like old times, me sat beside her on the settee watching TV, her arms around my shoulders, kissing my head from time to time, silently wiping away the tears that just refused to stop coming, while I acted like I never saw them. She wasn’t watching the telly really and neither was I. We each pretended for the other’s sake that everything was perfectly normal, ho hum, when it was clear the whole world had violently tipped and life as we knew it was upside down; each of us pretending neither had our ears cocked for the sound of his return, that neither of us was dreading it.

It was after twelve when we finally went to bed, yet late as it was I couldn’t go to sleep. I felt too confused, as if I’d been battered myself. Confused by all the feelings inside me that had nowhere to go, but still boiled and bubbled furiously like mutton inside a pressure cooker.

I wanted to kill him. I’d been angry before in the past, but nothing on this scale ever. I wanted him dead. My heart bled for her, but for him I prayed for a double-decker bus to mow him down that very same night, to splatter his carcass across the high street in a dead, flat mass. I hated him.

Yet beneath that, to my shame, and I would have rather died than admit it to anyone, beneath that, I was glad. It was clear to me he’d messed up big time. The single bright light that shone for me that night was that he’d gone too far. He’d hurt my mum in a way that was beyond understanding. What he had done, she’d never forgive. I’d wanted him out of our lives and, with his bad-tempered self, he’d handed it to me on a plate. After what he’d done, the relationship was over; I knew beyond any doubt that now and for all time she’d never take him back.

It would probably take a while for her to get over it, but once she did, things could return to normal and I would, as I’d wanted all along, have my mum back to myself. We would be happy, the two of us, the way we were before he came. And it was that comforting thought alone that made it possible for me to relax enough to finally get some sleep.

I brought her breakfast in bed. Tea and toast with scrambled eggs, arranged on a tray beside a love heart I’d cut out and coloured in myself to cheer her up. With him gone, I didn’t have to knock. Still I entered her room on tiptoe, so as not to wake her. But on that score, I needn’t have worried at all.

She was lying under the bedspread, on her side, eyes open, staring at nothing, and I wondered if she’d managed to get any sleep at all that night, because she looked wrecked.

She smiled and sat up, trying to act like everything was still cool, but it wasn’t and I knew it. She was treating me like a baby, like I wasn’t old enough for her to tell me stuff, so young and stupid in fact that if she pretended hard enough, I wouldn’t be able to guess there was anything wrong at all. And it struck me as weird really, because not only did I feel older, but it felt as though everything was reversed and somehow I’d become the mum and she was now the child.

‘Aren’t you going to school?’ she asked.

‘It’s just revision. It’s okay. I won’t miss anything.’

Normally there’d have been no way she would have let me skip school for no good reason. But I think she was too tired to make an issue of it. She must have known there was no way on earth I was going to go to school and just act like it was some regular, random day. How could I leave her alone in the state she was in?

She didn’t eat much. In truth, I’d done a bit of a bodge-job. I’d been concentrating so hard on stirring the eggs that I forgot the toast under the grill and it had burned. By the time I scraped off the black bits it was cold and somehow, all the black bits managed to get into the butter, which didn’t melt into the toast like it was supposed to, but just sat on top looking filthy. She was kind of humouring me with the few nibbles she had, but she didn’t fancy it and I could hardly blame her. She drank most of the tea though, and smiled at me between sips, and picking up the heart, she looked at it, blinking fast, and touched my face and kissed me and said thanks.

Her eyes kept welling and spilling, despite the smiles. It felt like her heart was broken and the knowledge broke mine. I wanted her back to normal but I didn’t know how to make that happen. I looked at the pathetic heart I had made. It had been childish of me to think a scrap of paper could change everything in a flash. How could it be possible for a tiny piece of paper to accomplish a massive thing like that? That day I learned a new kind of fear.

I ran her a bath and she lay in it for over an hour, hardly moving. I had to encourage her to get out and then all she wanted to do was just lie down and rest, like she hadn’t already rested for most of the day. When I went to check on her at lunchtime to see if she wanted me to make her something else to eat she was fast asleep and, I had to admit it, I was relieved.

While she slept I cleaned up downstairs. I moved quickly, trying to keep ahead of the fear that dogged me. Not of Berris, but of her, how she was. It was like someone had shaken everything out of her, every ounce of hope, every decent memory, everything good she’d kept stored inside, and left in its place a sack, one that could still be shifted from place to place, propped up, made to lie flat, but no matter how hard I searched, was empty inside. It did my head in to see her like that, really did it in. What would happen if she stayed like that for good? Was it possible for someone to never recover from something like this? It was sick and it was selfish, but still I wondered, if she didn’t recover, what would happen to me?