A Cupboard Full of Coats Read online

  Everything changed when he came. Everything. I couldn’t sleep in my mother’s bed any more, because he was in there every night. Suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to ‘just bust’ into her room, I had to knock first, and not just knock, I had to wait till it was convenient for them to invite me in. In my own home.

  Every day I waited to hear that he’d sorted his situation out and would be moving on. I even checked his stuff for signs he’d started to pack, but there was nothing. It felt like it was his house and I was the visitor.

  Berris wasn’t a gradual drip drop of rain, an off-and-on downpour. It was like on a sunny summer’s day there had been a sudden thunderclap, followed by a lightning flash and monsoon rain that poured without break, heavy, depressing, persistent, with no end in sight.

  About six weeks after he’d moved in with us, one night after he’d gone to bed, when she yawned and stretched and stood up, that night, I’d had enough.

  ‘How much longer is it gonna take him to find somewhere to live?’ I asked. He was always ‘him’. I would not call him ‘Uncle’ and I could not call him ‘Berris’ and I preferred to die rather than call him ‘Daddy’, so I called him nothing. She seemed surprised, as though living with him was just The Bomb for everyone.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong with him being here? We’ve got the space. He’s no problem…’

  ‘No problem for you!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t actually want to spend all my time in bed.’

  I heard the crack of a slap before I realized she’d struck me, and I was stunned. There was a delay of a few seconds before I felt the sting across my cheek, and in that moment I could tell from her face, her surprise was equal to mine. She had never slapped me before. Never. And to do it over that man! I was more upset about that than the pain. I began to cry.

  ‘I hate him. I don’t want him here. This is Daddy’s house, not his.’

  An even more amazing thing happened then. I knew she’d surprised herself with the slap, so I was expecting her to comfort me, to turn back into the person I knew. Instead it was the opposite, she went further, becoming a stranger before my very eyes. Maybe she’d been changing for weeks and this was the first time I’d noticed, but I realized then. Suddenly I saw a strength in her I hadn’t known existed. She pulled herself up to her full height, and looked at me steadily, coldly. The movement of her mouth when she spoke was exaggerated, like she was determined that even if I couldn’t hear the words I would be able to lip-read them.

  ‘This is my house,’ she said. ‘I say who comes and goes, and when. Berris lives here now. I hope I never have to have this conversation with you again.’

  5

  ‘S’funny thing to watch a person die. When you mum died, was out of the blue and there was things I shoulda said but I never, things I wished I’da told her but I didn’t, and I have to say for years afterwards, man, that troubled me.

  ‘I kept on saying if only I had the time back, and the knowledge I have now, I woulda done this for certain, I woulda said that for sure, woulda come clean for true and if I hadda done, maybe I coulda been happy. But Mavis taught me different. You don’t just need the right time, have to be that in you mind, you in the right place too. And that’s where you start in on the problem.

  ‘When Mavis was ill, when we knew for sure she was gonna die, when I watched her getting smaller by the day no matter what I cooked and fed her, that was the time to talk, to clear my mind of the worries I’d had the whole of my marriage, put them straight once and for all, but I couldn’t. It was the right place, but it felt like the wrong time. Hardly slept at all them last three months, tossing and turning like a fishing boat on top a rough sea, wondering what the best way was to put it; the best way to ask you dying wife, after you marry thirty-three years, if her thirty-two-year-old son was truly mine, just how to phrase it so’s it wouldn’t upset her.

  ‘Upset her so much during her lifetime, did so many wicked things no other woman apart from Mavis woulda tolerate, yet she did. Knowing she was dying, I had no right to say a thing to add to the pile of all she already forgived me for, not a shred of right, not a ounce or drop. I wanted to ask more than anything. I needed to know. But I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t bring myself to hurt her a single time more. In the end I swore to myself I would let it lie, leave all alone. I promised myself them words would never pass my lips. I would only do, I said, what needed to be done and say what she needed to hear me say and that was that.

  ‘But that question ate at my belly same way the tumour ate at hers. Never give me no rest, man. We talked some talk. Most of it about back home. Talked about them twenty-odd years we growed up there. Talked about everything under the sun, even down to lipstick.’ Lemon laughed, looking relaxed for a moment, swept along on the stream of his memories.

  I lay there, watching him as he spoke without a glance in my direction, staring out into space. He could have been talking to me or to the room or to God. At some point, he picked up the tail end of what he had been saying and carried on as if there hadn’t been a pause at all.

  ‘When we was young men, boys really, when I first met Mavis, her lips was red. They had a flower back home, don’t recall the name of it, but kinda like hibiscus. Folks used to call them “yellow flower”. The girls used to take time to open them, peel back the petals careful like, one by one, fretting and watching in case was a bee inside. You ever see a black bee? I’m not talking about no bumblebee. Them black bees don’t bumble, they fly like dragonflies, fast you see. And I tell you, them would soon as look at you as sting you. They was always round the yellow flowers, so the women had to be careful for true.

  ‘Inside the petals was what we used to call “the male part”, covered in a thick red powder. You rub you finger over the power then you rub it over you lips and that was lipstick. That was what all the girls wore then. That was the lipstick Mavis did have on the first time I clap eyes on her: yellow-flower red. When I try to remember her then, seems all I can see is her mouth and her teeth, pretty man, well pretty. She talked about yellow flowers, and school and the licks we used to get, and going to river, and mangoes. Man we eat some mangoes growing up. Eat mango till we have to go lie down. This is the kind of talk Mavis talk, recalling every tiny detail, while I feed her ice chips and press the flannel with little cool water on top her head, and all the while inside, that question was gnawing and gnawing away: Tell me, Mavis, did someone else kiss those yellow-flower red lips before me? Did you pass off another man’s child all these years? Is John truly my son?’

  He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, settling back on the settee beside me. I was getting used to his way of just stopping in the middle of the tale as if he were finished. I resisted as long as I could, then, ‘So?’ I said. ‘Did you? Ask?’

  He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t. Wanted to so bad, but I couldn’t do it. Them last weeks, she hardly spoke at all. Just thank you. And I love you. Then, two days before she died, she said it. Two words. Opened her eyes – was the only part I could still say for sure was her, the eyes, the only part the cancer couldn’t manage and left behind. Seemed like she was calling me, and I put my ear to her lips and she said, “He’s yours.” That’s all. He’s yours. Didn’t need to say who she meant ’cos we both knew. I never said a word to her but still she heard me, heard me asking. With her dying breath, she told me what I wanted to hear but was never man enough to voice…’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said. Maybe the alcohol had made me hyper sensitive, because this had to be the saddest tale I had ever heard.

  ‘I couldn’t even speak, was so choked. Just cried. And held her hand while she close her eyes and slept again.’

  My head was woozy. I was listening to him, listening to the inflection in his tone, and though I wasn’t sure my judgement was sound, it seemed he was not yet finished. He had wanted to know the truth, after thirty-three years no less, and she had told him. So why didn’t it sound like the story was drawing to a close? Why did it not sound like the end? />
  ‘But?’ I asked.

  ‘The thing is this: I know Mavis love me. Can’t say why but she did. Have to accept that, ’cos she never give me reason to doubt it. Was times when I rave all night Saturday, pass the day in other women’s yard and come home late Sunday night after I know she gone a bed. And my dinner was always there, dished and cover up on the side waiting; no questions, no blame, not a word. She knew me. Like a mother know her child. And no matter what blame was mine, she still go out of her way to make things all right for me, to please me. That was the problem.’

  ‘I don’t get you,’ I said.

  ‘I know Mavis woulda never said anything to me to upset me because she never did. Never. So even though she said it, I know she coulda say so not because it was true, but because she know it’s what I needed to hear, and she give me with her dying breath what she give me with her living life, a plaster, a kiss to make things better and stop me bawling. In hospital, them call it a plessi-bow…’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to hear any more…’

  ‘I knew Mavis would give me that lie ’cos she knew I needed it.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just believe her?’

  ‘And I took it. And wept. The last time she open her eyes, I gave her back a lie from the depths of my heart, I searched and found it and gave it back. The last words to ever pass from my mouth to her ears, the killer lie to beat all lies, one last big one to grease her passage to Calvary. She open her eyes and saw me where I sat ’side the bed waiting with her. I pick up her hand, looked her straight in the face, give her one last kiss and I said, “I believe you”.’

  He looked at me. He wanted something from me. Wanted it bad. But I was too overcome by sadness to work out what it was.

  ‘Was I wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t judge you,’ I answered. ‘It’s not my call.’

  ‘You know what you think though, don’t you?’

  ‘What I think doesn’t matter.’

  He wouldn’t let it go. ‘It matters to me.’

  I was surprised to find I felt so strongly about this woman, his wife, a total stranger. Whether he believed her or not was his business. Yet even though I knew that, I was angry with him. That he had taken Berris’s word over hers. That he had allowed Berris to ruin his marriage and offered no resistance whatsoever.

  ‘You should have believed her.’

  Instantly, his eyes were filled with tears and he sniffed, looked away from me and sniffed again. A speck of blood appeared on the floor at his feet, then another. He cupped his hands below his nose as the blood began to pour.

  ‘I need a tissue,’ he said, and I jumped up and ran.

  He was a difficult patient. He refused to lie down in bed and insisted he would clean up the settee and the floor himself as soon as the bleeding stopped. I helped him up the stairs to the bathroom, and when we got there he closed the door and locked me out. I cleaned up anyway, and when he came back down, holding a wad of toilet paper beneath his nose, and realized, he kissed his teeth.

  I had to virtually force him to sit down on the settee (again he refused to lie) and to lean his head back to slow the flow. He seemed unsurprised; clearly this was not the first nosebleed he had ever had, and he was adept at dealing with it, in an obstinate kind of resentful way. He refused tea and coffee and paracetamol, insisting the only thing he needed was another drink.

  I made it for him, fretting, convinced that more hard liquor, which he appeared to have been drinking non-stop since his arrival, was probably the last thing he needed. And when he took a mouthful, with his customary wince as it went down, I wondered whether he had some kind of alcohol-related illness or whether he was drinking more because he had some other medical problem and was of the opinion it no longer mattered what he did. Had he come to see me because he was putting his house in order while he still had time? As I had learned, the fact a person was too young to die did not buy them any more time. Was he dying?

  I sat away from him, in the wicker chair opposite, watching, gauging that the bleeding had almost stopped, thinking his skin colour looked less natural, more like the pallor I was accustomed to working with, stupefied by the realization that the thought of Lemon dying hurt, genuinely hurt; that there was a chink in the armour of indifference that I’d been enveloped in for years.

  I felt it.

  But I was no closer to telling him anything. He had told me heaps. More than I had asked for. Much more. Yet, so far, I had shared nothing. He was right, you couldn’t just pick up a piece out of a story and present it on its own. Alone, it was worthless. But I had not spoken to anyone ever about that night, had never trusted anyone enough to tell them the truth about what happened with my mother. I hadn’t wanted to. And now that I did want to, it seemed an impossible task. He didn’t need to know about Sam and her family and the garages and Donovan. I wasn’t his kind of storyteller, taking everything back to the dawn of time, slowly building up to the point chapter by chapter. This man was indecent. The choices he had made were beyond understanding, but the heinousness of them, the shamelessness, his disgraceful honesty, made him the one. It was either him or it would forever be no one. It had to be him. Maybe the beginning was wherever I chose it to be. It did not have to be Sam’s spots, or meeting Berris. Maybe it had nothing to do with feet and where toes were pointing.

  ‘I’m an embalmer,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I prepare the dead, so their families can see them. I work on people who have died, black people mostly, as a freelancer. Most of the funeral parlours round here use me. Probably because of the hair. They never know how to manage our hair. So they get me in and I do it, fix their hair and repair their faces, make them look comfortable, give their families back some peace. That’s what I do for a living.’

  ‘What kinda job is that?’

  ‘I enjoy it,’ I answered. I could not explain that it was the only thing I truly enjoyed, that among the dead was the only time I felt happy, that I was able to feel while I did my work: pride, vanity, grief, sadness, loss, something. That while I worked on those cold bodies, sometimes I found myself humming.

  ‘Can’t you get a job in some kinda beauty parlour instead?’ he asked, and I laughed aloud.

  ‘I could, but I don’t want to.’

  ‘Seems a strange way to make a living.’

  ‘Someone has to do it. Someone did it for Mavis. Bet you appreciated it then.’

  ‘It’s no kinda life.’

  ‘It’s the only life I have.’

  ‘It ain’t…normal.’

  ‘It suits me.’

  I wanted him to link my work to her. It was an obvious link, but I needed him to make the connection himself. Then I could explain it was some kind of atonement and tell him why. I waited.

  ‘You better not be planning to get them hands on me,’ he said.

  Despite my disappointment, I laughed again. ‘I can wait.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, but he shook his head slowly for a long time afterwards and I knew he was disappointed too. He wanted more for me and I knew it would have been impossible to make him understand that for most of my adult life there had been nothing more that I wanted, nothing more that I needed, nothing more.

  I put the TV on, sat back down beside him, and watched it in silence. Or at least I acted like I was watching it, face fixed resolutely in the direction of the screen. It felt strange, the close proximity, the sharing of the sofa, the evening. It reminded me of the years I’d spent watching TV in this same spot on another settee, with my mother, just us two; easy years, carefree times. I found myself more relaxed than I could remember being in a long time. And when he casually slipped his arm around me, over my shoulders, and pulled me closer so I was leaning into his warmth, I didn’t resist or pull away. I snuggled up against him as my son had done, and felt just like a child.

  In silence he held me, gently rubbing the top of my arm with his warm palm and I felt safe. For the first time since she h
ad gone.

  I felt it.

  Though I was no closer to telling him the terrible truth, I felt okay and I was grateful. I knew it was merely a lull, the calm before the storm, yet his being there with me made me feel like maybe, somehow, there was a chance, the smallest suggestion of a hope, that things might turn out okay.

  She made saltfish and Johnnycakes for breakfast. We’d never had it for breakfast on a weekday before, because the saltfish needed to be soaked overnight and boiled two or three times before it was ready to be used. And her Johnnycakes were a slow job, requiring sifting and kneading and frying on a low flame, to ensure that the outside didn’t cook while the middle was still doughy, and by the time the middle cooked, the outside wasn’t burned. It was a Special Treat, one we’d normally have for breakfast on Christmas Day or at Easter, and always on my birthday because, as we both knew, saltfish and Johnnycakes was my favourite breakfast.

  We both also knew she’d cooked it because of the slap.

  She must have gotten up at the crack of dawn to have it ready before I left for school, and I was glad – glad she’d recognized that what she’d done was weird and wrong, and even more glad that it had kept her awake, gnawed away, forced her out of the warm bed she now shared with Berris and into the kitchen at a time of day when those with clear consciences were still hard and fast asleep.

  I ate without speaking, swallowing bulky mouthfuls slowly, pretending not to watch as she packed up Berris’s precious portions into a couple of Tupperware containers for his lunch.

  She kept up a perpetual flow of conversation, about the quality of saltfish on sale down Ridley Road Market, how it was best to buy a whole fillet rather than the pieces cut to fit the small packets they were usually sold in, because after you boiled what saltfish was inside them, then skinned and boned it, there was often hardly any actual fish left and by the time you finished cooking, there was nothing in the pot but onions.