A Cupboard Full of Coats (3 page)

Mr Jackson was fifty-three when he took her in.
Fifty-three
. Fair with the tenants who rented the rooms in his house, he was a shrewd Jamaican migrant who had somehow landed soundly on his rickety old legs. He was gaunt from the diabetes that would eventually finish him off for good, and though half blind from glaucoma he still had vision enough to see that my mother was too beautiful to weep broken-hearted, forlorn in her single bed,
alone
.

Within a year, they were married and she was rescued. It was Mr Jackson who taught her how to be a woman, how to pick good vegetables, the best pieces of meat to buy, how to cut chicken, gut fish, where to shop for everything you needed to make a jug of Guinness Punch.

He took her shopping. Bought her jewellery and underwear, dresses and jackets and shoes that she chopped and changed like a child with a dressing-up box and nothing to do but play. She was too beautiful for anything but the very best and that was all she had because Mr Jackson doted on her.

My mother talked about herself all the time, told me everything about her life as though she were telling fairy tales, talking while she played with my hair or I played with hers, whispering in my ear as she tucked me into bed at night, or on cold nights in her bed as I snuggled into her warmth. About her and my father, how they had been married nearly three years before conceiving me, how by then he’d lost all hope of ever fathering a child. When my mother told him she was expecting, he was both overjoyed and convinced I would be a boy. It was Mr Jackson who called me the name they went on to enter into the
Register of Births and Deaths
, as if it were a real name they had given a lot of thought to, a normal name, borne of love. He said it suited me, not just a girl, but one who, instead of looking like his wife, resembled
him
; small and dark and demanding, too greedy for my mother to keep on the breast, too noisy for my father to want in their bedroom. After I arrived, he gave up the tenants and bought the house I still lived in, with a bedroom for them, one for me, and a third just in case, then kept me and my mother locked up tight inside it. Away from church and work and parties and shebeens and hard-assed younger men and life.

She whiled away a few more years till Mr Jackson died, cheating me of all memory of him bar one: me sitting on the bed beside him, rapt, listening as he told me a story. What it was about, I do not know. I can barely see him in the memory or recall any detail of the room. The most vivid thing I remember was my excitement, the sheer thrill I felt listening as he spoke. I must have been about three. By the time I was four he was gone.

I had completed a full circuit of the park and was too shattered to run the rest of the way home, so I power-walked, on shaking legs, past the estate and the garages, past the houses and gardens of normal families, back to where I knew Lemon waited. I opened the garden gate and, at the front door, felt my left calf beginning to cramp, so stopped and stretched it, trying to stave off the worst of the pains.

The one thing my mother always said about Mr Jackson was that he was a decent man, that he took proper care of things, including this mortgage-free house that he left to her, which she then left to me when I was sixteen and she was dead. Decent enough to ask no more of her than that she occupy it and dedicate her life to raising me, forsaking all other men till I had grown up. ‘Grown up’ she interpreted to mean when I was sixteen. It was ironic that I actually
had
grown up then. Sixteen and overnight my childhood was over.

Maybe everything that happened was Mr Jackson’s fault. Had he married someone his own age, he might not have been so obsessed with the idea of other men sleeping with his wife after he was gone. Maybe had she had the chance to live in the real world, she would have picked up a few strategies to stop it killing her. Or maybe if I’d been given a name like Peace, it would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy of a different kind.

But I was making excuses and I knew it. The fact was, I had done what I had done. Made up my own mind and committed myself to a course of action. My blame was my blame and my blame alone. I opened the front door and entered the house, then slammed it shut behind me, as if in doing so it was possible to lock a world’s worth of excuses outside it.

Inside the shower cubicle I scrubbed. Scrubbed my arms and legs, my neck, stomach and breasts. The scent of bergamot shower gel had begun to subside, and my skin reddened in response to what had become an abrasive rub till, eventually, it began to sting. I stopped scrubbing then, standing beneath the coursing water till the hot water went warm, then tepid, then cool, and the sting became a tingle and goosebumps swelled. I withstood the cold till I could bear it no longer, before finally turning the water off.

I slid open the glass door, reaching for the white thick-pile bath towel, becoming gentler with my aching body, slowly patting it dry. With the towel wrapped around me, I unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out on to the landing, headed towards my bedroom. As I passed my mother’s room, the door was slightly ajar. I paused outside it, listening to the silence within before slowly pushing it open and entering.

Inside her room there was a cupboard full of coats. The cupboard had been built into the alcove and was probably as old as the house itself. I went over and creaked open the door. The coats were suspended inside it on large wooden hangers, each one an expensive and beautiful work of fine tailoring, protected individually by transparent dustcovers. I ran my fingers across the tops of the hangers lightly before settling on one, which I then withdrew.

Carefully I raised the cover and examined the coat underneath. It was made from nubuck suede, a long, ankle-length, close-fitting garment, grey-blue like cloudy sky, with diagonal slit pockets lined in cobalt-coloured silk.

A gift.

A small tug, a dulled pop, the button was forced through the hole and the coat was off the hanger. I pushed my arms into the sleeves and stepped out of the towel nest around my feet. Deeply, eyes closed, I inhaled the stale scent of years infused with leather. A surreal dizziness mushroomed inside my head and I swayed slightly, then surfed the remainder of its wave.

I did up every button. My body was a little fuller than hers and the coat moulded my naked shape as perfectly as a second skin.

I walked to the mirror where I examined myself, turning this way and that, moving my legs to emphasize the long slits at the buttonless bottom of the front and the vented back. I studied my reflection side on, unhappy. I sat on the stool before the dressing table, pulled my damp hair up into a ponytail, picked up her brush and a powder foundation, and started dusting it on.

This was the one thing she had taught me to do well, applying make-up with such proficiency I could even make the dead look like they were dozing. She had let me brush her powder on, allowed me to practise coating her long lashes in sooty mascara, her full lips in glossy plums, while she sat hardly blinking, still as a doll. She had preferred Max Factor, and as I used up the items on her dressing table I replaced them with the same, though for my workbag I chose an assortment of brands that were just as effective on brown skins.

Apart from the foundations, her other cosmetics suited my colour as much as they had hers. I picked a red-bronze rouge, a golden eyeshadow, and painted my lips a metallic mocha brown. Finished, I examined my reflection again, still dissatisfied, knowing the picture was incomplete. I pulled my hair out of the ponytail, pushed my fingertips beneath the surface, down to the scalp, and tousled it from the roots to create more body. I pulled the sides and back up, leaving the top mussy and wild, and held the glamorous style in place with one hand.

I tilted my head slightly, exposing more of my neck, and mirrored in the glass I saw Lemon, just inside the bedroom door, and I froze, watching him watching me. He looked as shocked as if he had seen a ghost. My attention returned to my reflection where I expected to see myself posing, but instead, after all the years she’d been dead, I found myself face to face with my mother.

I gasped and stood up too quickly, knocking the stool over behind me, then tripping on it as I stepped back, releasing my hair and stumbling. I might have fallen but for Lemon who was inside the room now, close enough behind me that I could feel his heat. He grabbed my arm and held it firmly, steadying me. I turned around to ask whether he’d seen what I had, but when I looked at him, his eyes were as hotly fired as a kiln, and everything I had to say lodged as thickly inside my throat as grief.

‘She was beautiful,’ he said, slowly raising his hands and smoothing the sides of my hair, cocking his head as if to get a better angle for the view, smiling, but not at me, at something he saw in the distance. Some
one
. ‘I never seen anyone as beautiful in my life.’

He held my head between his hands like a ball, moving only his thumbs, stroking my eyebrows from thick end to thin with a slow, hypnotic repetition.

‘They have a rock down by Carr’s Bay back home. Huge. ’Bout the size of a small house, off the beach, in the water, with some small rocks leading up to it, good size but smalllooking alongside the big one; like a bridge. When you on top of the big one, it’s like you out to sea. Most times the sea down there was rough, with big waves – if you was in the water could knock a man down clean.

‘Don’t exactly know how to describe it, when I used to climb out there and sit down, how I felt, ’cept “good”. She was the only person to ever make me have that feeling on dry land. Just to look at her. That was all. Just to see.’

Leisurely, he ran his palms down my neck on both sides, thumbs around the front – if he changed mood they could strangle me – and out, across my shoulders, before returning to my neck. Then his hands moved downwards, over the front of the coat, tracing the swell of my breasts beneath the coat’s peach-skin nap. I stepped back.

‘No,’ I said.

It was his turn to step back. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the room, the floor, the walls, everywhere but at me.

‘She wore that coat that night,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘She was looking out for him the whole night and I was looking at her, feeling like I was on the rock, thinking what a fool he was, knowing he was still but a small fool compared to me, the Fool King.’

So much time had passed since then, almost a decade and a half, yet the details were all there, as vivid as if everything had happened only yesterday.

‘He was so angry,’ I said.

Lemon nodded. ‘I knew he would be.’

‘I couldn’t talk to him,’ but even as I said the words I knew that was not the truth of it. I had not spoken when I should have done, and then when I did, I had lied.

‘He woulda never listen. Not them times. Kinda man he was then.’

I pushed hard and the words tumbled out of my mouth. ‘I didn’t think about her; just me.’

‘You was young. You was scared.’

It was the compassion in his voice that made me bristle, the understanding. ‘How the hell would you know? You weren’t there!’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t.’

‘No one was! So don’t you ever try and tell me how I felt because I am the only person who knows.’

I turned my back to him and started unbuttoning the coat. Though my hands were shaking, I was impatient to be done. I knew now that he did not know. He was making excuses for the little he thought I was responsible for and he could not have done that if he had even the slightest inkling of the truth. But instead of relief, I felt disappointment. I had been let down. Again.

‘We need to talk,’ Lemon said. ‘There’s things I need to tell you. About me. What I done.’

‘Save it for
Trisha
!’ I answered, securing the towel around my body before taking the coat off. I retrieved the hanger from the bed and fed the coat back on to it, pulling down the cover, putting it back into its space inside the cupboard. ‘She’s got time and sympathy. Have you not noticed I’m a bit lacking on the touchy-feely front?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have.’

Another day, different circumstances, and the sincerity of his voice to my rhetorical question might have made me smile. I had hoped he had known and had still come anyway. It had to be him. He had always been the only person who might understand; my only hope.

‘You can sleep in here,’ I said. His eyes moved around the room, with its flower-patterned walls and old-fashioned furnishings in sharp contrast to the other rooms in the house. I’d had to replace the original carpet because the stains had been impossible to remove. Otherwise, her bedroom had been as carefully preserved as a crypt. ‘Unless you’re scared of jumbies?’

He gave a single nod and suddenly I was exhausted.

‘My son’s coming in the morning,’ I said. ‘You’re gonna have to give me space. I can’t do that and…this. It’s too much.’

He nodded again.

‘My son comes first,’ I said and felt a blush rising. I wondered why I had added those words and whether he had seen through them. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ I said, and left.

2

They arrived at ten on the dot, punctual as ever. Red rang the doorbell once and Ben banged the flap of the letter box over and over again non-stop, up until the actual moment I opened the front door. To hear him you would have thought there was some kind of emergency, that it was urgent he get inside, that maybe having had no contact with me since his last visit a fortnight ago, he was desperate to see me again. Yet the instant I opened the door he became shy, twirling one finger round and round inside his mouth, leaning against Red, the other hand wrapped around his father’s long leg as though it were a life-support system. Ben looked down at the floor, stealing glances at me with those huge eyes and thick dark lashes he’d inherited from my mother. Red nudged him with his knee.

‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your mum?’

Without taking the finger out he said, ‘Hello, Jinx.’

I bent down and picked him up, cuddling him clumsily, trying to ignore his passive resistance as I kissed him yet irritated by it; hardly one step through the door and he was already being difficult. He was clean, shiny as a new chestnut, and I inhaled deeply the smell of the cocoa butter on his skin and the coconut oil rubbed into his hair, sweet and at the same time cloying.