A Cupboard Full of Coats Read online

  I carried my drink into the living room and he followed. I sat on the settee and he sat down beside me. I shifted over a bit towards the end, so we were further apart. He reached over and switched the telly off. When he turned around to face me, I could tell from his expression he intended to stall no longer and I began gathering a few openly hostile responses in my mind to bring to any discussion concerning me or anything I considered to be My Business.

  ‘You know I’va son, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  ‘You know how long I never see him?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘I’m not really in the mood for guessing games…’

  ‘Thirty-two years,’ he said. ‘From the day me and Mavis

  came to England till the day I took her back home to get bury. Left him behind with Mavis’ sister, the oldest one. She was still living with Mavis’ mum. There was plenty space for the boy to run round, ’nough people to watch over him. Was only supposed to be for a year or two, now here we are.’

  He sighed, as though he had finished talking. I waited for what felt like a long while before saying, ‘I’m assuming there is actually going to be more, that you were actually endeavouring to make a point?’

  ‘I wrote to him, after Mavis pass,’ he said, his tone neutral, as though he hadn’t heard me speak and was continuing of his own accord. ‘First letter I ever write him. Mavis used to write all the time, think sometimes two, three letters a month. We never had no more kids after we come here, and well, I wasn’t around much, working working working, come night-time out with me friends, as you know. Think she was probably bored most the time. And lonely. But she never said a word. Never said, “’Isn’t it ’bout time you start stay in?” or nothing. Can’t remember her complaining about a thing, all the years we was married, ’cept the cold of course, always the cold. Never could get used to it, no matter how long we live here. Couldn’t stand it at all. Anyway.

  ‘Though I was never one for writing and such like, I wrote him when she died. He moved to the States ’bout ten years ago. New York. Married an American woman out there. You might think it strange I never just ring but after all the years I never ring when she was alive, was a habit hard to suddenly break after she pass. So I wrote him, told him ’bout the funeral arrangements, etcetera. Mavis always say she never wanted to be bury here in the cold ground for all eternity, so I took her back home, like she wanted. Wrote and tell the boy the date and time. He came over on the day. Never brung the wife but he came – thirty-two years I never seen him till then – and he brung the grandkids.’

  He put down his glass and ran his palms over his trousers as though trying to smooth out any creases. I had seen people do this in the undertakers, occupying their hands as if doing so straightened out the thoughts in their minds and made it possible for them to say things they could not otherwise say. I remembered an elderly Jamaican woman, widowed two days, who stood beside her husband’s casket twisting her handkerchief between her hands for half an hour, then saying, ‘I’ll never forgive him for this.’ I looked down at the floor and Lemon carried on.

  ‘Course I knew they was born, Mavis tell me and I seen the pictures John send, but at the funeral was the first time I actually laid eyes on them in the flesh. Two boys and a girl. The girl…’

  He was grappling for words though I didn’t know why. He was a natural storyteller and, angry as I was with him, I was entranced.

  ‘At the graveside, I was crying, man, couldn’t stop. Anyway, I felt something and I look down and she was holding my hand real tight, and she smile at me. You know, if Mavis wasn’t six foot under by then, that’s exactly what she woulda done, hold my hand and smile. No words, nothing extra, just a little simple something for me to know she was supporting me, standing by me, like she always done, even all them years when I give her no reason for it, never give her nothing back, but she done it anyway. Now I’m not a man to go with all the jumbie business – though me nah say a word against Jack Lantern, you understand – but I when I look into the girl’s eyes, was like looking into her grandma eyes for true and the thing shock me.

  ‘That night, couldn’t sleep, just up pacing this way and that till after dawn when there wasn’t any point trying to catch sleep again. And I wondered, how could a little nine-year-old girl know to do that, that that was the best thing she coulda done, that nothing else in this life coulda comfort me more? Just a hand. One tiny hand. How could she know? S’impossible, innit?

  ‘I never felt so shame. Every time I think ’bout it, water come to me eye. To know she live nine long years and not once I ever did a thing for her, not a biscuit, not a ginnip, not a bean, and she still give me her hand. Man, it make me feel small.

  ‘John never stop in Montserrat. Went back to the States same night. Had some urgent business to attend – or so him say – so off he went. Didn’t get a chance to speak to him or nothing.

  ‘Anyway, I wrote him. Asked after the family and such like, then ask why he don’t come up to London. Said I would pay the fare and they just come up and stay by me for a few weeks. He wrote back real polite, not angry or nothing, say he long find comfort in the Church and he have all the father he need right thereso. And you know what? The worse thing of all? I couldn’t even say nothing, because the man was right. His whole life I never put myself out even the once. Why should he raise a finger to do something for me now?’

  The tale was done, his point made and I bristled.

  ‘Look, no offence right, it’s nice of you to share this with me, but my situation is not the same as yours.’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘But that’s your point, isn’t it? You’ve messed up with your son, I should try not to mess up with mine.’

  ‘All I’m saying is sometimes you know things need sorting but you don’t do it. Someday you might find you dallied so long, the time’s passed and you don’t have the choice no more.’

  ‘But I’ve been there for Ben. I’ve bought him birthday and Christmas presents, and every Easter I get him an egg…’

  ‘And tomorrow?’ he asked.

  I knew he wasn’t asking about the one day, he meant the future; tomorrow and the day after and all the tomorrows thereafter, but I responded literally.

  ‘Tomorrow, I’ll go and take some advice. In law, Red doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He can’t stop me seeing my son. It’s my legal right.’

  ‘You legal right,’ he repeated slowly, like he was feeling the words in his mouth, exploring them, rolling them around. As though he had been talking about rum and I had brought up rhubarb. When he looked at me, his eyes held something in the way of contempt.

  ‘I need some decent food,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna go do some shopping and when I get back, I’ll cook.’

  ‘Fine. Whatever.’

  ‘I take it when I get back you gonna let me in?’ he said.

  He was offering me a choice. When I looked at him his eyes were speaking again, mocking me: I know you, they said, know the type very well. You’re a runner. A duck-and-diver. Scared.

  ‘You can take my key,’ I said, getting up. ‘That should reduce some of your worry, shouldn’t it?’

  Having given him the key so he could go shopping to buy the things he needed to cook, I naturally expected him to have the money to pay for them, but he did not. When he asked me for money, I collected my purse, grudgingly pulled out a couple of twenty-pound notes, and handed them over without meeting his eyes.

  I gave him a curt nod on his return home. He was laden with so many carrier bags it looked like he had done the whole week’s shopping. Though I wondered when I saw the mass of food he had bought, I could not quite bring myself to open my mouth and enquire just exactly how long he planned on staying. Nor to mention, though it hadn’t escaped my notice, that he hadn’t had the courtesy to hand back any change.

  It was not my intention to make him feel self-conscious – it would have been pointless an
yway; the man was immune to subtlety – but I sat on the high stool in front of the breakfast bar scowling as he hummed and unloaded some of the bags, then began searching the entire pot cupboard for a suitable vessel in which to bubble up his concoction.

  As soon as he had hoisted the pumpkin out from inside one of the bags, a piece that was about a quarter of the size of a large one, burnt-orange flesh oozing moist white pips, I knew what he was making. What else would a Montserratian man shop for and cook on a Saturday? It was such a stereotype that on another day, in better humour, I might have chuckled. He was making soup.

  I watched as he exerted himself, thwacking the skin off the pumpkin, reducing the flesh to fine-slivered squares, then chopping the cucumber and onions while the kettle boiled. Everything went into the pot on the stove and he lit the fire beneath it.

  My mother had cooked pumpkin soup on Saturdays, virtually every Saturday when I was young, yet I had forgotten. Somehow, it had slipped my mind. Lemon had eaten here, eaten that here, years back, laughing and blowing hot spoonfuls with Berris. He was contriving to look innocent, but I damn well knew the only reason he was cooking soup now was to take me back to then.

  Without asking he turned on the kitchen radio. It was set to Classic FM. Bach’s Magnificat ceased abruptly as Lemon began to retune the station, turning the volume up in an effort to hear the faintest illegal transmissions of reggae pirate-radio stations, and the static crackling and hissing, the tuning in and out of stations he had no interest in, went on at length, stretching my poor nerves till I felt like a passenger travelling on a fast train beside an open window.

  He found a station of his choice finally, an old-style giggipgiggip channel, playing the weary, slow reggae of singers long dead. To raise them, he whacked the volume up as high as it could go.

  My eyes followed him back to the sink where he washed the lamb, lifting the pieces out, and trimmed off the fat and bloodied edges with fingers that went about their task deftly. Compared with how clumsy his handling was of the table knife I gave him last night with dinner, he wielded the meat cleaver with the finesse of a pro.

  All the while, he kept a lit cigarette poised in the right-hand side of his mouth. He kept the smoke out of his eyes by keeping the right eye half closed and his head tilted slightly to the left.

  I watched.

  He put the lamb into the pot and emptied another kettleful of hot water over it. He selected a few choice branches of thyme, ran the water over them at the sink, shook the excess off as though he were shaking down the mercury in a thermometer, then tossed them into the cauldron as well. He rummaged in the cutlery drawer for a ladle, positioned himself in front of the cooker and, with his back to me, as uninhibited as if I was not sitting there watching him and scowling at all, as he stirred the pot, he started to dance.

  Instantly, the room was filled with the aroma of soup beginnings, the earliest stage when all the ingredients still retained their own fresh and heightened smells, an aroma that was a group or sequence of different scents that assailed individually, till the fragrant thyme finally rose to dominate. Then, on the back of the record before it, from the radio came the instrumental sounds of ‘Mr Bojangles’, and John Holt’s smooth vocals began to croon about the very first time he’d met him.

  There were things I no longer believed in. God was one; a pretty straightforward process of elimination had clarified that issue once my mother was dead. And all the stuff she believed in, that they all believed in, their generation, the spirits and jumbies and obeah, the miscellaneous hocus pocus, all of that nonsense I had thrown out years ago. I was not a spiritual person. I did not believe in karma – of which I had seen little evidence – or fate or destiny or anything along those lines. It goes without saying that listening to someone explain an out-of-body experience would have produced little more response from me than a sneer.

  Yet I don’t know how else to describe it. The combination of the soup and the music and Lemon throwing down moves like he was Mr Bojangles himself, and I had a feeling, like déjà vu, as if the whole universe and every sound and atom of air inside it had curved sharply and was blasted back on rewind at warp speed, and suddenly the kitchen was full of glamorous bejewelled women, and sharply dressed men, the air filled with the smell of party foods: lamb curry, rice and peas, beef patties, goat water, salt-fish fritters and fried chicken. There were drinks galore, the hard stuff, rum and vodka and whisky and brandy, and everyone had a glass, drinking and chatting away in voices that sounded like they were cussing each other, drowned out by loud and regular laughter.

  Over in the corner stood Berris on his own, sucking on a toothpick, immaculately dressed even by his standards, dripping gold from every part of his body that could sustain it, sipping whisky chased with water, red-eyed from the marijuana he had been smoking, green-eyed with petty rage, staring through the open double doors between the kitchen and the living room.

  In the living room, calypso blared, Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, and a sea of bodies bobbed and swayed, arms raised, backs bending, hips bumping, waists winding, and in the midst of them all, my mother, the best dancer of all the women there, and Lemon, the best man, bouncing off each other’s bodies in a perfect passion of rhythm and style.

  Finally, Berris put his drink down on the counter closest to him and removed the toothpick from his lips. He dropped it into the glass and began making his way towards them. His gait was brisk and sure, like a bulldog on muscular legs slightly bowed, his shoulders moving as if they too were strolling, left right left right left. In his expression there was no trace of anger or malice. Instead his features were set hard into the focused expression of a man who had repulsive but necessary tasks to perform; the man responsible for garbage disposal or sewage clearance, the person charged with vermin exterminations.

  Only his eyes blazed.

  All but two of the people in the house that night were aware of him as he walked, and the wave of bodies across his path parted as if he were Moses himself. For a man who danced badly, there was grace in the fluid swing of his arm, and my mother spun across the room in a clumsy pirouette for one who danced so well. She landed on the floor in shock and it was only after she touched her nose and saw blood that she even realized what had happened. By then, Berris had passed her en route to the record player. There he dragged up the stylus in a loud and permanent scrape across the LP. In the quiet, no one spoke. Berris looked around, like a proud father at his daughter’s wedding, just checking he had everyone’s attention, about to commence his speech: ting ting ting. It must have been a trick of the dark, but he appeared taller, his chest fuller. He had but the two words to say to the people watching, and when he spoke his voice was loud but calm.

  ‘Party done.’

  When I came to I was lying on the settee. I felt dizzy and confused. There was a pillow under my head and a blanket over my body. It was dark outside and the living-room lights were on. Kneeling on the floor beside the settee was Lemon, his hand on my forehead, like he was checking to see if I had a temperature. There was a pain towards the back of my head, above the left ear, like I had taken a hard blow. I looked around the room, trying to get my bearings. It was the decor that was out of place. My mind was in the wrong era. She was not here and had not been for years.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. My throat was dry and I cleared it.

  Using his thumb, he pulled back my eyelids, first one then the other, examining my pupils, looking for signs of concussion I guessed.

  ‘You passed out. But not to worry. I gotta strong feeling you gonna live.’

  ‘Super,’ I said.

  I tried to sit up, but the effort required was too much. I flopped back down and Lemon adjusted the blanket gently.

  ‘You have somewhere to go?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then rest up. Relax. S’about time you start take care of youself.’

  I thought about my life, tried to think of a single good thing in it, just the smallest reason to wan
t to live, to care enough either way, and found nothing.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘What no kill you make you strong.’

  ‘Spare me the cheery sermons, please.’

  He looked at me like I imagined I looked at Ben sometimes. As though I was a difficult child and he was doing his best to not rise to it. He picked up a bowl containing water and a flannel from where he had placed it on the floor beside him and I realized while I had been unconscious he had obviously been using it to wipe my head. It felt like the greatest act of kindness anyone had done for me in years, that simple functional task: dipping, squeezing, dabbing. To my horror I felt tears prickling the surface of my eyes.

  ‘I’d really prefer to be left alone,’ I said.

  He stood up. ‘Let me get you some soup.’

  Oohh, that soup, that soup, that soup; it was heaven. Not too runny, not too thick, the consistency was perfect. Saffroncoloured and bursting with flavour, with small, soft pieces of yam and sweet potato and green banana and tania seed, and chewy torpedo dumplings. The lamb was not overcooked till it fell from the bone, but had retained its elasticity. Every mouthful bore deliciously delicate treats: carrots and pearl barley and christophine and lima beans. He sat beside me on the settee and fed me like he must have done his wife, slow, careful, spoonful by spoonful. I recalled the story of Rapunzel and her barren, unhappy mother who, having tasted the salad pilfered from the witch’s garden, decided she must have more of it or die. With every swallow, how I identified with her.

  And as I ate in wonder, Lemon spoke non-stop, voice low, as if I were too infirm to converse back and it was incumbent on him to keep the conversation going single-handed. The most important ingredient was the pumpkin. Once the pumpkin was good, you were halfway there. And you had to know the difference between what you wanted boiled into the soup for flavour and what should be kept back and added later. And you needed to know when the lamb was cooked, the point at which it should be removed from the pot, to be later returned. Timing was everything. To cook a perfect pot of soup, you had first to learn how to tell the time.