A Cupboard Full of Coats (2 page)

He swallowed a mouthful from his glass, closed his eyes as it went down, then took another quick swig. He dabbed the sleeve of the dressing gown delicately against the corners of his mouth as if he were using a napkin. He would have seen her hollowed out, skeletal, with even her gums shrunken so her dentures no longer fit. They would have used wax to plump her cheeks out, to give her mouth a fuller, more natural shape, and a transparent liquid tint to make her skin tone lifelike. In the right hands she would have looked healthier dead than when he’d last seen her alive. Though I knew he was married, I had never met his wife.

‘What was her name?’

‘Mavis.’

‘What was she like?’

He shrugged. ‘I took care of her myself. Never put her in no home or nothing. Had to give up my job and everything. Couldn’t manage both.’ He raised his glass again, this time to sip. ‘Must be the first time I touch her, she fall pregnant. Her mum was gonna chuck her out in the street and she never had no place else to go. Must be three months from I meet her, sex her, baby on the way, and we done married off already.’

‘Did you love her?’ The words were out in the open before I’d even realized they’d been in my mind. It was the question I had wanted to ask him when I was sixteen years old. All this time it had waited, as intact as if it had been embalmed, buried deep inside my memory banks, and I hadn’t had a clue.

‘Baby was on the way so fast, and she was sick, sick and vomiting till the boy born. Bills was coming like mountain chicken after rainstorm, one after the next after the next. Never had time to roll on a beach, or check a dance till dawn. Never really laugh much…hardly smile. But at the end, I was there for her. Cooked her pumpkin soup. I feed her from the spoon and wipe her chin. I change her nappy and clean her mess. I did that.’

‘Did she love you?’ I asked.

For a moment, he did not respond. When he shrugged it was as if he considered the question irrelevant. He said, ‘She let me stay.’

It was my turn to share, to present my life’s summary. His turn to ask random, intimate questions. I waited but he asked nothing. Finally, ‘I have a son now,’ I said.

Lemon looked around the room slowly, taking in the alcoved shelves filled with books, the comfy wicker chair beside them, the settee that ran the length of one wall, the stereo in front of the window, the TV on the stand above it. There were no toys to be seen. Nothing to indicate that anyone other than me lived here. I had photos but they were not displayed like fertility trophies on my walls.

‘He lives with his dad,’ I said too quickly. ‘He’s coming tomorrow. Comes every second weekend and stays.’

He nodded, then stared back down at his glass without the slightest curiosity. I was relieved. I was always braced for the automatic surprise to that statement, the judging people did of me, their revision of everything they thought they knew about me before, like knowing that one fact put me as an individual into context. He hadn’t done that and I was glad. In all the years he’d been away, there were some things that hadn’t changed. People always felt they could trust him. That had always been his gift.

‘So is that why you came?’

He looked up, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed. I had lost him.

‘Because of Mavis.’

He smiled sadly, and shook his head.

‘We never talked,’ he said. ‘About you mum and all that.’

Though I knew we would talk about her, that it was inevitable she would come up, I panicked, standing up even though I hadn’t finished eating, reaching for his plate, scraping the untouched contents on to mine, gathering together the cutlery and placing it on top.

‘She’s been dead for years. It’s over,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ he asked, then looked away, down at the floor, wriggling his toes as he spoke, alternate feet tapping the floor like the hands of a drummer sounding a beat. My heart began to pound, the wine spun inside my head and from nowhere nausea rose inside my stomach like a buoy.

‘Berris came to look for me,’ he said, then added, ‘He’s out.’

I did the washing-up. Then wiped down the cupboards and the worktop. I cleaned the cooker, emptied the bin, then swept and mopped the kitchen floor.

Lemon was in the living room. Smoking. I could smell it. It was something I had forgotten, the smoking. Him and Berris had both smoked back then and burned incense over it. Benson & Hedges and the occasional spliff. My mother had provided the incense. She had never been a smoker herself. The only other man she’d ever lived with was my father and he hadn’t smoked either. Yet, like everything else, she accepted it without a murmur, throwing the windows wide, pinning the curtains back, waving the joss stick around in circles. I closed my eyes and for a second I saw her: small and slim and perfect, arms raised, dancing.

He’s out.

He had served fourteen years of a life sentence, a fixed-term punishment with rules and walls that had now ended, and I envied him. Able to begin his life anew, his crime atoned for in full. Blamed and punished, he had served his time, then been freed. Free to visit Lemon so the two of them could talk. Now Lemon was here to talk to me. I inhaled deeply, leaning against the wall, eyes closed, willing myself to calm down, unable to stop the question echoing inside my head: how much did Lemon already know?

I took a saucer from the cupboard and carried it back into the living room. He’d been using his hand, his cupped palm, to flick the ash into.

‘I don’t have an ashtray. I don’t smoke,’ I said, handing him the saucer.

He was sitting in the middle of the settee. I moved to the wicker chair opposite and sat there, watching him, waiting for him to speak. He held the cigarette pinched between forefinger and thumb, took a long, slow drag and opened his mouth to allow some of the smoke to curl lazily upward into his nostrils, before finally drawing it down into his lungs. As he blew out, his rounded lips shaped the smoke into rings and he pulsed them out, one after the next, till the smoke was gone.

The nausea from earlier was still there, like my mother was being exhumed, and in the silence it was getting worse. I was desperate to know what he knew, yet at the same time petrified he would blurt it out before I was ready. It was that fear which drove me to speak first, to start the conversation from the outside edge, the farthest point away from the core that I could find.

‘So how’d he look?’

‘He’s changed.’

I raised my eyebrows, looked up at the ceiling and pursed my lips to contain a snort.

‘Don’t believe it if you want, but it’s true.’

‘I’ve heard that before…’

‘He’s not the only one.’

I felt the familiar stirring of anger, and I embraced it. Had he expected to find me the same after all this time, after all that had happened? ‘I’ve grown up,’ I said. He didn’t respond. Instead he concentrated on putting the cigarette out. ‘So what did he want?’

‘To say thanks for me being his friend.’

‘How touching.’

‘And he asked after you.’

‘Ahh…sweet.’

‘And to say sorry.’

‘Fuck him!’

Lemon raised his eyebrows. His was the old-school generation. It was all right for them to
rass claat
and
pussy claat
and
bomba claat
, but children were expected to be seen and not heard. Even though I was an adult in my own right, I was still a clear generation younger than him. He considered my swearing disrespectful.

‘It’s a bit late for apologies,’ I said.

‘It’s never too late to try and undo the wrong a man’s done.’

‘That’s rubbish and I don’t want to hear it! She’s dead.’

‘I take it you’re without sin?’

Though there was no suggestion of sarcasm in his tone, I felt myself struggling to read between the lines, trying hard to gauge what he knew; flailing. ‘I don’t need any belated apologies from him. Or lectures from
you
on sin.’

‘That’s not why I came.’

‘So why did you come? What is it you want?’

He looked away from me, down at the floor. Now it felt like I was pressuring him, but it was already too late for me to stop.

‘He cried, didn’t he? I bet he bawled his eyes out. He was always good at that.’

‘He wasn’t the only one.’

‘And you listened and nodded and said, “I forgive you”?’

He didn’t answer. Nor did he look at me.

This time I made no effort to hold the snort back. ‘I need a drink,’ I said.

I went back into the kitchen, took another glass from the cupboard and filled it with more wine I did not want. My heart was pounding inside my chest, my throat dry; the hatred I had spent so many years suppressing was back with a thud as hard-hitting as a train. All the walls, the structure, the neatness of my life, and he’d smashed through them with two words casually tossed.

He’s out
.

I left the wine untouched and stormed back inside the living room.

‘You know what, I don’t want you here,’ I said. ‘You’d better go.’

And he said, ‘Not yet.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t care that she’s dead!’

He didn’t even glance my way, merely shrugged. ‘And me? I never gave a damn that she live.’

I had been running for the last four years. It had come upon me one day, a few weeks after Red had left me. I hadn’t worked since I was six months pregnant. That probably had a lot to do with it, because when I was working I was
feeling
. Outside of the cold room, I felt nothing. That particular day, I had finished repainting my bedroom white. It had been cream when I’d started, cream and burgundy, because Red hated white. He said it was sterile, that he wanted to be comfortable kicking off his boots in the bedroom, to feel cosy and warm. Once he had gone, I had no further need for compromise, so I changed it.

I had thought that when it was finished I would feel something; satisfaction or pleasure, even uncertainty or dislike,
anything
, but I didn’t. The job was finished, that was all. It was done. I washed the brushes, cleaned out the bathtub, packed the cans away into the garden shed and went upstairs to look at my handiwork again. My relationship had ended and Red had taken my son. My life was my own and I could do anything I wanted, yet I felt nothing. As I stood staring at the walls, searching inside myself for some kind of emotional response, the nothingness suddenly welled up inside me, like a physical mass, so vast and empty and infinite I was terrified. The very first time I went running, it was from that terror, from the possibility of being sucked down into emptiness for ever, and as I ran I discovered I
was
able to feel; pressure in my lungs, pain in my legs, my skin perspiring, the pounding of my heart.

My routine was erratic, I ran when I felt like it, usually five or six times a month. So was my style. It was nothing like that of the runners I grew accustomed to seeing, the ones who regulated themselves, jogged two or three times a week, who did a warm-up first and stretching exercises afterwards, the people for whom the activity was a hobby. I ran like my life depended on it, as fast and as hard as I could. Sometimes, passers-by would look beyond me as I ran towards them, with fear in their eyes, trying to see who or what was pursuing me, trying to work out whether they should be running too. As long as I was feeling, I didn’t care.

But that night, with Lemon smoking in the living room, my mother dancing in the kitchen and Berris out, it felt like my circuits were overloaded. I found myself feeling too much at once to be able to process any of it, and the only thing I could think to do was run.

I left him sitting on the settee, pulled on jogging bottoms and trainers and took off. The moment I closed the garden gate behind me, my feet began pummelling the pavement and I found myself headed towards Hackney Downs in a sprint.

I turned right at the park, intending to follow its perimeter, and raced along Downs Park Road, with the park on my left and the Pembury housing estate on my right. The evening was as dark as night, the weather drizzling again and windy. Icy cold.

I felt it.

Felt the breath in my throat like pure eucalyptus, the liquid droplets in the air against my face and neck, my calf muscles screaming. I focused with all my might on the things I could physically feel, hoping to cork the memories Lemon had stirred up about a time I had no desire to remember, and it worked for about twenty minutes, till I had run more than halfway around Hackney Downs. Defeat came in the form of a piece of paper, a mere scrap, tossed on a wind to land against my hand with a wet slap. I flicked it off immediately and increased my speed, but it was already too late. Suddenly it was impossible not to think of her, my mother, and the choices she had made, to wonder how any woman could ever be so pathetic, could become so weak and passive that she would not raise her own hand to defend herself, even in the final moments when she must have known that if she didn’t she would surely die.

*

Too beautiful. Everyone said she was and it was true. With baby-wide eyes and long thick lashes in a perpetual flirtflutter, and purple-blush lips that parted in a half-moon over even ivory teeth, and high colour so flawless it was as if she had been slow-dipped in a vat of chestnut gloss, lowered and turned and raised by a patient doll-maker, his hands clenched tight around the ebony mass of her kink-free coolie hair – my mother had been a beauty.

She was the only child of a poor, uneducated Montserratian land worker and his semi-literate wife. In an era when it was normal for Caribbean migrants to leave their children behind with relatives as they headed out to the Motherland to make their fortune, with the wild card Hope flapping hard against the ribcage, my grandparents took their daughter with them. Between the three of them, they bore a single cardboard grip, and most of what was inside it belonged to her. Everything I know about them I learned from her, and the sum of everything she said was that they could not have worshipped God himself more than they worshipped the ground she walked on. Full stop.

She was too beautiful to make her own way to and from school at a time when every other child in the country was doing it, or to cook or clean or shop or carry, or even to amass a single useful life skill. So when she was seventeen and my grandparents died, it is hard to imagine what would have become of her were it not for the benevolence of my grandfather’s friend Mr Jackson.