A Cupboard Full of Coats Read online

  Lemon held his hand out and Ben took and shook it. Then he started to laugh.

  ‘Hey! Who give you joke?’ Lemon asked.

  ‘Lemon’s a funny name.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘I don’t like lemons. When I lick them my eyes go squeezy squeezy.’

  ‘Next time, dip it in sugar first. Then taste.’

  ‘Is that how you eat them?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Lemon likes lemons,’ Ben said and laughed again.

  Lemon looked at me. ‘I see there’s more than one comedian in the family,’ he said.

  Though I could not think of a single joke I had cracked with Lemon, I gave him a tight smile and answered, ‘So it seems.’

  Ben walked over to the settee and was about to sit down. ‘Come on, Ben. You need to come upstairs with me so I can change you.’

  ‘Are you going now?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Lemon said. ‘I’ll be right hereso when you come back.’

  Then, as if he had just been given the best news he had heard in a long, long time, like maybe his team had just scored the goal that would assure them the cup, Ben punched the air and grinned.

  ‘Yeah!’ he said.

  If Lemon had been wearing a skirt, Ben would have been up underneath it. He followed Lemon around like he was a beloved relative who after having been missing for years and presumed dead, had miraculously been found alive and restored to the bosom of his family.

  The two of them played with their lunch, chicken nuggets, ketchup and chips – the only meal Ben was guaranteed to eat a bit of – as if they were both five-year-olds. Lemon laughed his head off at everything Ben said and, inspired by this, Ben hardly paused between words for breath.

  I listened as he told Lemon about Max in his class whose front tooth came out when he bit into the apple in his packed lunch. There were anecdotes about his Power Ranger toys, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Shaggy’s exploits in ScoobyDoo. He talked about his new teacher, Mrs Smith, and how impressed she was with his reading. Lemon gave him a piece of paper and a pen and Ben proved once and for all that he could write his name himself without any help from anyone.

  I was in shock. I had never heard my son like this before. I had simply thought he was a morose child, because morose was how he always was when he was with me. I had never seen this side of him, this laughing chattiness, the non-stop outpouring of everything going on in his life, the pleasure he took from his accomplishments, such as they were. And I felt hurt. Really hurt. Wounded to the core just listening to how natural and happy he could be with a virtual stranger, when I had been trying for nearly five years to have a relationship with him and had come up against brick after brick after brick.

  He made me feel how he had made me feel when he was a baby. Like no matter what I did or how much time I put in or how hard I tried, anyone could walk into his life and they were immediately more important than I was. Like I did not matter. My existence meant nothing. And all the while, as I sat on the periphery of their conversation, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier, and though I tried to rationalize my way out of it, I just couldn’t stop myself.

  So I left them to finish lunch together and I did more cleaning. Upstairs, I entered the smallest room of the house, Ben’s. I had painted this room while I was pregnant, a pale yellow that had darkened over the years to a colour similar to the skin on a bowl of cold custard. I had chosen yellow because it was a perfect colour for a girl’s room, and neutral enough in case the baby had been a boy. It contained a single bed covered in a yellow quilt, which ran the length of one wall, a small wardrobe and a tiny desk with drawers below. On top of the desk was Ben’s bag for overnighting, his dirty clothes folded neatly beside it. A large car was parked in one corner, left behind when Red had left four years ago, too cumbersome to carry with them at the time, then just forgotten. Since then, Ben had grown so much he could no longer fit inside it.

  To be honest, there was nothing inside the room to clean. This was a space that merely needed the occasional airing. I had left my son downstairs and gone upstairs into his empty bedroom to connect with him. It was ridiculous, but true. I sat down on the bed and held my head in my hands. For the umpteenth time, I wished with all my might that things between me and my son were different, but they had been this way for ever.

  I never wanted a boy. All the way through my pregnancy it was a daughter I prayed for. A living doll to dress up and cherish, who I could sing to and fuss over and love with abandon. Then along came Ben, after a difficult birth; two days’ hard labour, episiotomy, forceps and suction cup, the boy had to be dragged from my body in a screeching, splitting, bloody gush, huge dark balls and willy in disproportion to the rest of his body.

  Red was over the moon. As ecstatic as my father might have been had I been born a boy. He returned to the maternity suite that evening grinning and bearing a blue-ribboned bouquet of long-stemmed white lilies – my mother’s favourite; flowers that would have been perfect for her grave.

  But Ben wasn’t fooled by any of this. For the first day he didn’t feed, just lay there watching me, an unhappy frown creasing his dry, scaly brow, disapproving even then, as though he knew the numb, dumb shock I was going through was as much to do with him as the experience he had put me through, like he was already aware he couldn’t count on me. He had an air of resignation about him, acknowledging me as his biological mother and also, his certainty that I would eventually let him down. I wondered if he wanted to die.

  The second day, as if some reasoning had altered the course of his mind, he started to cry, a shrill, angry catcall to feed, mouth opened wide to be filled with the breast and when I gave it to him he clamped down on it like a vice, not just drinking milk but consuming me, like some starved pygmy cannibal, sucking so hard I could have stood up and let go of him and he would have swung like a pit bull, suspended in mid-air by the sheer power of his jaws and the vacuum forcing my nipple deep down his throat.

  Within days my tender flesh was reduced to raw, weeping meat and he had to go on the bottle. I harboured hopes then that with my body back I might begin the process of recovering, but no. If it wasn’t hunger or nappy rash it was colic, night and day, unsettled and unhappy, he cried and cried and cried, calming down only in his father’s arms, sleeping only on his father’s chest, rejecting me so completely the only thing I felt was resentment.

  That was when the advice started, from the man able to get away for ten hours every day and have a break from the relentless whining: how to hold him, how to feed him, how to wind him, not to shake him, and in between regularly reminding me that the six weeks of abstinence the midwife recommended had long passed. That was when I bought the costume, when I realized he was thinking about sex while I was thinking about ways to kill myself, when I knew without doubt we had run out of middle ground.

  Having Ben changed me into something I had no idea how to be: a mother. I had expected it to come naturally, but for me it didn’t. And the fact that parenthood came so easily to Red made it worse. He stepped into the role of father as if his whole life had been leading to it, as if it were the culmination of everything he was and had ever wanted.

  Finally, a few days before Ben’s first birthday, Red had had enough. He said it was the swimming costume, that it made him feel bad.

  Like a rapist.

  When I realized his suitcase was already packed, sitting on the floor beside the door, that he was not raising the issue as an agenda item up for discussion, that what he was actually doing was informing me of the decision he had already made, I tensed, the anger coiled up inside me as tight as in a cat psyching up to the pounce.

  Then he picked up Ben.

  If a proper mother should have argued, should have insisted that the offspring remain with her, I was not a proper mother. My experience was that motherhood was a façade, a fabrication that sometimes took sixteen years to unravel, but occasionally just the one single year was adequate.
I held the front door wide for them both to leave and I felt two things. The first was disappointment. About all the time I had invested, all that energy wasted. As a woman, both as a mother and a partner, I had failed. The second feeling was sadness, sadness and disbelief, that a single elastic garment could be held to blame:

  Exhibit one, your honour!

  As if that one tiny item had ever been large enough to bear responsibility for everything.

  From downstairs I heard laughter. I stood up and got started. I plumped and straightened the bed, wiped down the window ledge, moved Ben’s car to the passage outside the room, then swept the floor and mopped it. Finished, I could see no point returning the car to the same spot it had occupied for years like a memorial, so I picked it up, carried it downstairs and left it by the front door.

  They were watching TV when I went back into the living room, on the settee together, with Lemon’s arm around Ben’s shoulders and Ben’s head virtually wedged up into Lemon’s armpit, watching one of those patronizing children’s programmes where there was a huge focus on covering guests with snot-like goo, and the presenters shouted every word they spoke and leapt about like they were high on E. The kind of senseless show I detested, and they were laughing their heads off. Both of them. As though it was the funniest thing either had seen in some time. And they were oblivious to my presence. They noticed me twice; once when I swept the floor in front of the TV, and the second time when I mopped the same spot.

  Ben was in his element. Normally I never allowed him to watch stuff like that, but that day, everything was out of control. Berris was out. Lemon was here. The cinema had been a disaster and now my home was filled with a cacophony of screams from the TV and its audience of two, locked into each other’s arms like old mates. Finished, I sat down at the table pretending to read and, at some point, Ben stood up to go to the toilet. On his return he spoke to me for the first time since lunch.

  ‘Why’s my car in the passage?’

  ‘I’m throwing it out. It’s too small for you. That’s why.’

  ‘But that’s my favourite car.’

  ‘Really? When’s the last time you played with it?’

  ‘But it’s mine. I don’t want you to throw it away.’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to have a full-blown discussion about it. You don’t play with it any more and it’s too small for you even if you did want to. It’s pointless keeping it. It’s going in the bin.’

  He was silent for a moment. He glanced over at Lemon, probably hoping for some support from that quarter. When none was forthcoming he looked down at the floor. ‘I wish you was dead,’ he said, his voice so low I thought I had misheard.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He looked up at me, eyes full of tears. ‘I wish you was dead!’ he shouted. ‘I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you!’ and fell upon me, kicking and punching and biting and scratching and wailing at the top of his voice, deranged and hysterical.

  For a moment, I was completely immobilized. He could have said anything else in the world to me and it might have been okay. But those words were too terrible. What had I ever done to him that was bad enough for him to wish that? I pulled him away from me with one hand and with the other I slapped him hard across the face. There was a moment of shocked silence, a deep sucking in of breath on Ben’s part and then he let loose one mighty piece of screaming.

  Lemon jumped up from the settee and ran over to him, picking him up and cuddling him. Ben locked his arms around Lemon’s neck and his legs tight around his waist. He threw back his head and howled at the top of his lungs.

  I too was stunned. It could only have been a few seconds that I stood there, mouth open, to say what, I have no idea, but at some point I realized the phone was ringing. On automatic pilot I walked over and picked up the handset from on top of the TV.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. Over Ben’s screams it was impossible to hear what was being said. I put my free hand over the other ear, listening hard.

  ‘… see if he’s okay…Look, what the fuck is going on over there?’

  It was Red.

  Thirty minutes later he arrived and took Ben from Lemon without a word. The moment Ben saw Red the sniffs grew worse and as soon as he was in his dad’s arms he began to cry again, letting loose the proportion of distress he had deliberately held back for the moment of his grand finale.

  Cuddling and kissing Ben as though he too was close to breaking down, Red took him out to the car, where he mollified him for another five minutes before returning to collect his bag.

  He was as angry as I had ever seen him. An involuntary tick pulsed at the edge of his left eye. He picked up Ben’s bag, then turned to face Lemon, who stood beside me.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lemon said, but instead of leaving the room, he went and sat down on the settee, as if he was suddenly fully engaged in watching the TV and by some miracle was giving us the privacy Red had been too subtle requesting.

  ‘I know how it looks,’ I said, ‘but Ben…’

  Red’s hand came up in a Stop sign. ‘Just don’t! Don’t you dare blame him.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to blame him…’

  ‘I don’t wanna hear it,’ he said. ‘This is the end of the line. I’m not doing this any more.’

  ‘If you would just let me explain…’

  ‘But I don’t care what your reasons are. He’s been here for five hours. You haven’t seen him for a fortnight. How could things get this bad so quick?’

  ‘Red, if you would just listen…’

  ‘But it’s just more rubbish. He’s a little boy. Four years old! Don’t you think he’s already got enough on his plate?’

  I didn’t answer, because what was on his plate was me: absent mum, useless mum, bad mum. I knew it and I didn’t want to discuss it in more detail in front of Lemon, but Red was on a roll.

  ‘You don’t visit. You don’t phone. You don’t do anything. I’m the one going round mopping up, making good, lying to him so he thinks, despite everything you do and every word you say, that you care. Well, I’m done with it. No more.’

  All I wanted to do was wrap the discussion up as quickly as possible. ‘It’s obvious there’s no point trying to discuss this with you, so where do we go from here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not bringing him any more. You want to see him, you come to our home and see him there. You wanna talk to him, pick up the phone and ring.’ He glanced at Lemon lounging on the settee in his dressing gown, like a sugar daddy. ‘Assuming you can make the time.’

  ‘You seem to have forgotten something; he’s my son too!’

  ‘Really?’ Red asked, looking at me, waiting for more, but I could see no need to elaborate. The fact that I was Ben’s mother was irrrefutable. He shifted the bag to his other hand and turned around to leave. He was almost through the livingroom door when he stopped and turned around. The anger was gone, replaced by an expression I could not identify.

  ‘Do you know he cries for you?’ he asked. ‘Did you know that?’

  He watched me for a moment, waiting for a response, but it was so inconceivable I could think of nothing to say. Then he waved his hand as if I were a waste of space, dismissing me. He left the room and a moment later the front door slammed shut.

  And then, in case the whole thing wasn’t already bloody obvious, and only Lemon had been endowed with sufficient insight to recognize this was not a positive development, at that moment he turned around to look at me, shook his head slowly and said, ‘Hope you don’t think I’m minding you business when I say that did not go well at all, at all, at all.’

  3

  Although it was not yet three, and early in the day even by my standards, I poured myself a glass of wine. I did not offer Lemon a drink. The rational part of me knew that the episode with Red and Ben was not Lemon’s fault, but another part of me held everything that had happened firmly against him; if it had not been for him I would have changed my clothes and gone to
the park instead of the cinema, so there would have been no wet trousers and no scene. If he had not been here when we returned, Ben would have been paying attention to me and because I would have been paying attention back there would have been no cleaning done upstairs and the old car would still be sitting in the corner of the bedroom gathering dust. If it had not been for him, my head wouldn’t have been so filled with Berris that I could hardly think properly, never mind function. No matter which angle I approached from, Lemon sat squarely in the way, and however much I tried, it was impossible to push the blame beyond him.

  He helped himself to a vodka on the rocks anyway, watching me all the while, giving me a look that asked: Well? Are we going to talk about this or not? It was a look I pretended not to understand; my private business was nothing to do with him. Instead, I fixed my face into an Ask me any questions and I’ll chop your head off look to keep him at bay. And so for a while he said nothing.

  He looked comfortable leaning on the counter, glass raised, examining the contents as though it were the first time he’d ever had the opportunity to study the clarity of vodka at leisure. It wound me up that he dared to look relaxed when my life was breaking down around me. Then I realized that whatever he did would wind me up because it wasn’t the things he did that pissed me off so badly, it was him. Why had I asked him to stay? I had succumbed to a moment of weakness, a desire to confess the unspeakable, had believed that somehow this man could deliver me, as if such a thing was possible, as if life had not already taught me that the only person I could ever truly depend on was me, and I felt as angry with myself as I did with him, that I had been stupid enough to believe that anything good could ever come from bringing history into my home. It was as much my fault as it was his, and not talking to him was childish and ridiculous. This knowledge, though obvious, instead of making me behave differently however, simply increased my resentment.