A Cupboard Full of Coats Read online

Page 12


  And they were: he would be light-skinned and sensitive and gentle and caring. He would be as good-looking as Superman himself, and like all the men in Mills & Boons, he would be mature. And experienced. Most of all, he would never hurt me or use me or do anything to make me cry. If he didn’t match those criteria, he might as well forget it.

  And for some very strange reason when I’d thought all that through, it was Lemon who came to my mind; Lemon, with his friendliness, his wide mouth, good looks and laughter.

  The older, more sophisticated man.

  And I shivered.

  They’d been shopping. From the number of bags in the living room, it looked like they must have stopped and bought something from just about every single shop they’d passed on the way to the jewellers. My mother had mentioned marriage only this morning and by the afternoon, there it was.

  The ring.

  She’d also mentioned babies. Though he’d only been with us for two months, I wondered whether Sam was right, that any day now I’d be hearing the patter of little ostrich-shoed feet. Everything was moving too fast for comfort. It felt like I was playing catch-up.

  She showed it to me.

  Bling bling!

  A white-gold band with a row of gems that twinkled and glittered every time she moved her hand, but no matter how hard they struggled to compete, they were overshadowed by her smile.

  Berris said nothing. He sat on the edge of the settee, watching her watching him, the two of them playing games with their faces. It was like a whole language had evolved between them, one I could not speak or understand; whole statements made in the lift of an eyebrow, the puckering of lips, the cutting of eyes, the smiley mouths. Before, they’d had to go to bed to make me feel ignored. Now they were managing to achieve it even while I was in the same room.

  He’d bought her a skirt, long and flowing, crinkled silk fit for a gypsy princess, and two pairs of shoes, pointy winklepickers I would have liked to have owned myself. She’d picked him out a bottle of aftershave because he only had like twenty bottles or so in his personal collection so far, and an LP by Roberta Flack, whose voice was strumming my pain with her fingers track by track as it played in the background.

  And he’d bought her a real fur coat, a long one that fell from her shoulders to below her knees in thickest, darkest, sleekest brown. It was, without a doubt, the most luxurious and glamorous item of clothing she’d ever owned. It looked like mink, although he said it was just lame old cony fur from rabbits. Fur jackets were the cutting edge of cool and not only had I seen other women in them, but I’d longed for one myself. Hers was the first full-length one I’d come into close contact with, and it was by far the most beautiful coat I’d ever laid eyes on. In it, even I had to admit, she looked like a movie star, and she acted like one too, holding her hand in front of her mouth like a runway to launch the kisses she blew in his direction. All very Marilyn Monroe.

  Finally, my surprise was brought out, in a green drawstring bag that identified it immediately. My instinct was to snatch it out of her hands, and it was only the fact that I remembered my age that stopped me.

  ‘You bought me Dunlop plimsolls,’ I said.

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘We.’

  There was a time when if my mother had said we she’d have meant me and her. Now it was them. She was still a part of we; it was me who wasn’t. They used to be other people, those who lived outside our home. Now they were inside; it was me and them.

  In my view, it was a blatant case of curryfavouring. The fairy-tale king was becoming a fairy-tale father, so generous he was even prepared to treat the stepdaughter like his beloved own. I’d wanted those Dunlops for nearly a year, yet following fast on the back of the we comment, taking them out of the box made me feel ill.

  ‘Try them on then,’ she said, all excited. ‘See if they fit.’

  I toed a moccasin off one foot reluctantly and replaced it with a pristine white plimsoll.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said, though I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the shoe or this fabulous new life of hers. She paused and waited, then quietly asked, ‘What do you say?’

  She’d hoped, I knew, that I’d have said it without the prompt. The words were there all right, clogging my throat, but I had to use the biggest force to get them out.

  I glanced at him quickly and feigned a brief smile. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I felt gutted, like everything in my life was wrong; somewhere I had taken the wrong turning and ended up lost. It was as if my mother’s happiness was in direct proportion to my unhappiness, and any joy I had inside me was being sucked out to double her portion. I was running out of avenues in which to turn, and somehow she’d become oblivious to what I was going through.

  Later that evening Lemon came round and, incredibly, I was as happy to see him as if he were my friend come to visit. He brought with him a bottle of Appleton’s rum and some sweets in small white bags; a quarter of aniseed twist, a quarter of Tom Thumb pips, and a half-pound of pear drops, which he was particularly partial to; big ones encrusted in sugar, which cut the roof of your mouth if you got a bit impatient while you were sucking them.

  I appreciated the sweets more than the plimsolls I’d so longed for. To me it was as if he’d actually been thinking of me and had made an effort to not make me feel left out, and it was ironic, because of everyone in the house at that moment, he was the outsider, the one I should have felt furthest from. Instead I felt closer to him than either Berris or my mum.

  Lemon was the perfect house guest. He took no liberties. He didn’t walk in with his bare hands swinging, dishing out demands. Not only did he not expect to be waited on, but he seemed to be on the lookout for chances to be useful. Why couldn’t my mother have gone out with him instead? How much easier was he to get on with, to be around?

  After dinner, he offered everyone drinks and it was Berris who told me to get up and give Lemon a hand, as though he was too busy to do it himself, and I was some sponger just sitting around scratching my backside. I went with Lemon to the kitchen where he made himself busy, collecting glasses, pouring liberal swigs into them and topping them up with the chaser.

  ‘You just worry ’bout the ice,’ he said with a smile, and I went to the freezer and pulled the tray out of the drawer. It was the gentleness in his voice and the smile that really did it to me.

  I held it out to him and he took it from my hands, then asked, ‘What’s up?’

  There is a moment when there is so much stored up inside it’s like you could burst, when anger is the only way you can hold it together and just about keep it all in, when even the smallest act of kindness will push you over the edge, into the abyss of the bawlers. His question caught me in that moment. It was impossible to answer, way way way too vast. And everything that was wrong welled up in my throat and eyes thicker and faster the harder I tried to regain the smallest driest dregs of self-control. Suddenly all was lost and the tears spilled and I started to cry. Not any normal kind of crying, but the kind where once you start you need to cry up everything inside you, and nothing short of exhaustion or dehydration will allow you to stop.

  He didn’t say, Hey, stop that. Or, Don’t you worry, it’ll all be okay. Or, What is it? Why are you crying like this? He didn’t even seem uncomfortable. The way he pulled me into his arms was natural. Like a father might have done, and he didn’t need me to say a thing, as if my tears themselves were a language he understood and I didn’t have to say a word.

  I cried buckets. It was like I’d started out as a rain cloud and when the tears stopped, I’d become a fluffy white one hanging in a pale blue sky, basking in the light of Lemon, the sun. He released me then, went and pulled off a strip of kitchen roll and handed it to me to blow my nose. It was abrasive, scraping the rims of my nostrils like a scourer as I blew and blew, then wiped. Finally, testing my choked voice box, I uttered the word ‘Nothing’. And he laughed.

  ‘Well I’m glad it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘If it was something
, we woulda need to call out the coast guard.’

  I sniffed and involuntarily smiled.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said.

  And to my surprise, I actually did feel better.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘S’no big deal. Most things, all they want is a little gentle handling.’

  He put the last touches to the drinks and dropped in the ice cubes, then tidied up behind himself, putting everything back in its rightful place. He even wiped the cupboard sides down and when he’d finished, if you had come into the kitchen afterwards, you would never have known he’d been there at all. I don’t know why, but that impressed me. Berris was meticulous about grooming himself. His shirts and trousers were ironed to perfection and at the point of his putting them on they were faultless, the seams brought to the zenith degree of sharp, which he admired in silence while running his clothes brush over them back and forth, removing microscopic specks that were invisible to every eye but his own. But on a domestic level, he seemed to expect – and my mother was happy to oblige – that everything was done for him. He sat like a god, entertaining himself with his music while she cooked, coming to the table to find his plate awaiting him, and when he was finished he just leaned back to let his food go down, and shortly after, as if by magic, she’d appear and take it away. Perhaps because Berris was the first man in my life – I couldn’t really count my dad because I didn’t remember enough about him – I’d come to think that maybe that was just how men were. But Lemon was different.

  ‘Grab those,’ he said when he was done.

  He picked up two of the glasses on the table and I picked up the other two.

  ‘The full one’s yours,’ he said. Then, ‘You ready?’

  I nodded and we carried the drinks back inside where we handed them out. I sat on the settee and watched Lemon settle himself on the floor in front of the stereo. A moment later, he was transformed into the music maestro.

  Music was his passion. It was obvious. He selected records impeccably. He seemed to know exactly what tunes followed perfectly from the one before and his particular skill was setting and maintaining a mood and masterly judging the moment to change it.

  He played and they danced.

  Berris was a reasonable dancer. Not completely crap, but nothing special either. He had rhythm and he could hold a decent two-step, but nothing that made you want to watch him. On the other hand, my mum was wicked. She was compelling viewing anyway because of her looks, her high colour, her long legs and her perfectly rounded bum that made the back of her jackets fall into the soft curve of a duck’s tail. She had been born to be beheld, and never was she more compelling to watch than when she danced.

  She used Berris like he was a maypole, a baton in the hand of a marionette. She used him. In physics, we’d learned about malleability, the property of being able to take on different shapes, of being easy to form and reform, and that was what she was when she danced, malleable. As if her body was the sea, a wave, honey, the wind.

  As I watched, I was suddenly overcome by jealousy. I wondered why so much had been given to some and others – specifically me – had been given so little. I discovered that I was even more jealous that she was dancing in front of Lemon, and he rocketed upward in my estimation of him when I realized he was purely focused on the music, glancing at them from time to time, but not with the hangdog openmouthed adoration that Berris exhibited always. Lemon looked like he had even less interest in her than he had in watching Berris dance.

  Four or five tracks later, she’d worn Berris out, and Lemon changed the tempo, brought it right down with Esther Phillips, ‘Turn Around, Look at Me’. My mum and Berris melded into one intertwined dancing being, eyes closed, every part of the front of their bodies touching the other somewhere; her head in the curve of his neck, his head folded downwards as if she were his favourite pillow, her arms around his waist, his hands flat against her hip and back, both of them moving so slowly, they were but a fraction of a movement removed from standing still completely.

  I was so engrossed in watching them I hadn’t seen Lemon get up, hadn’t realized he’d come over till I felt him tugging me by the arm to stand and, when I did, he pulled me in his direction and we danced.

  It was the first time I’d danced with a man. I’d danced with my mother many times, up close, eyes closed, but this was different. Before, I hadn’t thought about my body, hadn’t been aware of it, had instead been consciously counting the beat in my head, like I was at a dance lesson aiming to learn something. With Lemon, however, I was aware of nothing but my body, the shape of it, the quality of every movement and how it would look to him; the jellying of my knees, the drumming of my heart, and the heat that blazed inside my body and intensified on the surface of my skin at every place I felt his slightest touch.

  Most things just want a little gentle handling.

  He held my waist lightly with one hand, scorching a handprint there for ever, and his other held my free hand, pointing outwards as if we were dancing ballroom, with a respectable distance between our bodies of about a foot or so. His eyes were open, as were mine. It was the first time I’d seen him dance and it was obvious straightaway that he was good. Good enough to be the perfect partner to my mother. The knowledge made me feel even more ungainly.

  All I kept thinking was, This is it. The real thing. I’m dancing my first dance with an older, more sophisticated man and I’m in love, yes I am, oh my God, I love him. At the same time I was stricken with embarrassment because I knew the way he was dancing with me was because he thought of me as a child when I wanted so badly for him to hold me close and treat me like a woman, to lay my head against his chest and have his arms wrapped around me tight for the rest of my life.

  I died a thousand deaths wanting to watch him move, dreading he would catch me doing it, knowing he was watching me and laughing, not out loud, just with his eyes, not at me but with me, because he was my older, more sophisticated man and the only person on earth who understood my suffering.

  ‘Pull up, Mr DJ, come again,’ Berris said and Lemon released me, lifted the needle back to the beginning of the track, turned the volume up a little more, then took me in his arms again, a fraction closer. Though it was a record we’d played many times before, for the first time, as we danced, I found myself listening to the lyrics.

  There is someone watching your footsteps,

  Turn around, look at me…

  He looked through my eyes and into my soul. Though the words came from the stereo speakers, it felt like Lemon was talking to me aloud.

  There is someone who really needs you,

  Here’s my heart, in my hand.

  Turn around, look at me,

  Understand, understand…

  He knew me. Knew my anguish and how much I was hurting. A witch doctor of rhythm remedy and he was fixing me.

  Look at someone who really loves you,

  Turn around and look at me…

  Releasing my waist he spun me around like a ballerina, with his other hand raised high above my head, holding my hand, then caught me in his arms at the end of the second revolution, closely enough against him for me to feel his heat, and my breath caught in my chest and I felt a rising dizziness that seemed connected from my head to my groin and I don’t know how, but he knew it. I saw in his eyes that he did. And for one totally crazy mind-blowing moment, as our gazes locked, it was inevitable; he was going to kiss me then and there. My real-life Superman.

  ‘This ain’t no cradle-snatching business, Lem,’ Berris said, and the moment disappeared like a balloon popping, vanishing into the space between us, as Lemon firstly stepped back, then let me go. ‘You better remember you’s a big old married man.’

  I hadn’t known he was married till then. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. In my fantasy he’d been single, bowled over by the beauty he suspected lay beneath the darkness of my skin. Passionately in love with me. Ridiculous as it was, I felt like he’d cheated on me.

 
; ‘Ease up Berris. They’re just dancing,’ my mum said.

  Lemon walked back to the stereo and began flicking through the LPs leaned up against the stereo.

  ‘You better go buy a guard dog,’ Berris said to my mum and they both laughed. Lemon laughed too, without looking at me, but it was the kind of laugh you laugh when everyone’s laughing at a joke and you don’t want to make it seem like you’re the only person without a sense of humour. I, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing at all.

  ‘I’m a big old married man,’ he said drily. ‘You don’t need no guard dog on my account,’ but it was me he looked at when he added that last bit and, like my mother, I went crashing from cloud nine straight on to the asphalt.

  I’d made an utter fool of myself.

  ‘I’ve got my biology revision to do,’ I said lamely. ‘I’m going up.’ And as quickly as I could without running, I left the room.

  Everything had been inside my head. He’d been laughing at me, not with me. I’d been a total idiot.

  Upstairs, with a burning face, I relived the dance while a quiet bass vibrated softly from downstairs and I wondered what his wife was like, how old she was and whether he loved her. Though I felt like the world’s biggest prat, it struck me that the difference in our ages was still smaller than the age gap between my mum and my dad, and that I was only a little younger than she had been when she’d gotten it together with Mr Jackson. Had she felt as I did now? Had she wondered what it felt like to be kissed by him? Had he known and laughed, then taken her? Was it possible that there had been nothing between us, that Lemon had felt nothing for me at all?

  His wife had to be a witch, a fat old hag with a crooked nose and feet big as the susquatch, reeking of BO, her chin covered in coarse dark hair. Without a doubt, she was liquorice Mojo black, with pink rubber lips, alopecia and stinking breath. How could he not love me? How could he not?