A Cupboard Full of Coats Read online

  ‘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.

  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 int
o 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. Someone. ‘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.