A Cupboard Full of Coats (20 page)

‘Come on, Jinxy, don’t be difficult.’

‘I’m sixteen. Stop treating me like a kid.’

‘I’ve fried you some chicken and plantain,’ she said too fast. ‘And some coleslaw and potato salad and rice. I know you’ve got revision and stuff to do, I just didn’t want you to be here till late on your own. That’s all.’

‘Fine,’ I said. Then Berris took hold of her hand and pulled her into his body and they picked up the beat of ‘Secret Combination’ first with their feet, then their hips and thighs, then her head was against his chest, and their eyes closed.

When they left hours later, the top of the house smelt like a whirlwind had passed through a cosmetics factory: Skin so Soft and cocoa butter and Dax and hairspray and Brut and Soft & Gentle and Chanel No. 5, a dense cloud so cloying it threatened to suffocate those of us who remained behind.

I stayed in my room. In the pre-Berris era, my mother would have sought me out and given me a kiss before she left. That night, however, she remembered me only as an afterthought on her way down the stairs, chuckling at something Berris had said, shouting goodbye through a throat full of laughter. I doubt she even realized I hadn’t answered, like she was nowhere near noticing how miserable my life was, how much I needed someone to be there for me and how wretched I was that there wasn’t anyone.

Though I hadn’t yet seen him or said hello, I knew Lemon was downstairs. I could hear the low music playing. I didn’t care if it came across as rudeness; he could go hang. I was sick to death of concerning myself with other people when it was clear that no one was concerning themselves with me.

For a couple of hours I sifted through textbooks and notes, trying to revise, taking nothing in whatsoever. She’d been with me, Sam, in all of these lessons, and everything I touched reminded me of her, of notes we’d passed and jokes we’d cracked, and the billion things we hadn’t yet done that we would never have the chance to do now.

It was ultimately hunger that drove me out of my room and downstairs to where the curry-favour banquet was that my mother had prepared, all of it stuff I liked. I virtually tiptoed down the stairs, stepping in time to the bassline of ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, hoping I wouldn’t encounter Lemon, then for some weird reason when I didn’t, feeling disappointed. I paused outside the living-room door, holding my breath, spying on him through the crack on the hinge side. He was lying on the floor with a cushion under his head. His arms were folded over his chest, his legs crossed at the ankles. Eyes closed. His fingers and his feet danced.

It was the first time I’d had a chance to study him unobserved. For a moment, I forgot my stomach and just looked. He wore a pale cream cotton shirt, the wrists folded over several times loosely. His forearms were hairy, or maybe they seemed hairier than they really were because the hair on them was thick and dark and contrasted hard against the paleness of his skin, which was maybe even slightly lighter than my mum’s.

The older, more sophisticated man.

He wore navy slacks that fit him snugly and it was easy to imagine him naked, so perfectly sculpted were his legs inside them. I bet they were covered in hair too, like his arms were. His trousers were especially tight and raised high over his wood and I wondered whether it was just his wood that filled out that part, or was it hair as well, a thick Michael Jackson Afro of pubic hair? It was so tantalizing and at the same time so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

His eyes opened.

My dash to the kitchen was clumping and clumsy and, to style it out, I was doubly noisy, banging the cupboard doors and crashing my plate on to the table, rustling through the containers in the fridge, desperately trying to compose myself, willing my breath back to normal. When I closed the fridge door and straightened up, he was standing just inside the doorway, watching me like he was trying not to laugh. The bowl of coleslaw in my hands felt heavy. I put it down on the table, beside my plate.

‘Thought it was some kinda stampede going on in here,’ he said.

‘I’m just getting something to eat ’cos I haven’t had my dinner yet,’ I said, praying that the blush I felt could not be seen, while at the same time positive it was just blatant. My hands were shaking as I peeled the clingfilm from the bowl. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

‘You need help?’

I shook my head.

‘You sure?’

I nodded.

‘You think the fridge door likely to ever open again?’

‘Funny!’ It was a feisty answer for me, but instead of making me feel embarrassed, it made me feel bolder. Not bold enough to look at him, but my hands were steadier as I forked out some coleslaw on to my plate and smoothed the clingfilm back into place.

‘I’ll sort myself out,’ he said, as though I’d offered to dish up food for him as well.

‘Right,’ I answered, putting the bowl back into the fridge and making a show of closing it in slow silence.

‘You sure there’s nothing you want?’ he asked, and it felt as though his voice had plucked a string. Low down in my belly, even lower, something went
twang
. I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t move. My legs felt like jelly beneath me and I didn’t trust them enough to even shift my weight. I nodded.

‘I’ll be inside if you change you mind,’ he said and then he was gone.

I was too wound up to eat. Too wound up to even know what it was that I wanted to do instead. I put a dish over my plate and put the whole thing in the fridge. I went back upstairs, ran a bath and sat in it. It was Lemon’s body I thought about lying there in the warm water, feeling my own body, so familiar and at the same time so different, sensitized in new places to the heat, the lapping, touch.

Out, I dried myself off, creamed my skin and put on deodorant and a clean pair of knickers. Wrapped in a towel, I padded back to my room and put on a dressing gown. I thought it might cheer me up putting on a little make-up, that looking good on the outside might make me feel good on the inside. In my mum’s room, sitting in front of the mirror, I put on mascara and blusher, then carefully, with hands that were insufficiently steady, a dark plum lipstick. I examined my reflection, trying to decide whether I looked sexy or silly, then because I truly couldn’t make my mind up, I wiped it all off. I reapplied the mascara in the hopes of making my lashes look fuller and my frog eyes smaller. I didn’t know if that worked either, but I left it anyway.

I felt brazen. I was a little girl playing at being a grown woman and the thought that Lemon could have even the slightest interest in me was ridiculous. Not only was he married but I knew without ever having set eyes on her that his wife was gorgeous, like my mother, light-skinned and graceful, with long coolie hair and a deep husky laugh, and him finding me sexy was as likely as any man preferring corned beef to T-bone steak. I abandoned the whole scenario in my mind, the Mills & Boon fantasy, images of Lois Lane and Superman. I realized I was hungry again and, following the sound of music, went back downstairs.

When I walked into the kitchen he was sitting there eating, and when he looked up at me I froze and he stopped chewing. I no longer felt brazen, I felt naked under his eyes, my Superman. Did he have X-ray vision? Could he see through my dressing gown? Did he know how little I wore beneath it? I fought to keep on moving, to look natural. My legs were trembling so bad, I wondered if I was going to fall over in front of him. If that happened, he’d have to call an ambulance because I wouldn’t be getting back up. I would be too shamed. I’d have to pretend to be unconscious. If my legs buckled and I ended up on the floor, I’d actually prefer it if he thought I was dead.

‘I left you plate in the fridge,’ Lemon said, and his voice sounded different, but I couldn’t be sure if it was really his voice that was different or whether the blood pounding in my ears just made it sound different to me. I felt a stirring low inside my stomach, kind of like a rumble but different, more tense. He was eating a piece of plantain, sliced and fried. The oil on his lips made them shiny and, as I watched, he licked them.

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, and dragged my eyes upward to focus on his. He put the cutlery down.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said, and I knew it wasn’t the blood in my ears then, that his voice really was choked, because he cleared his throat.

I didn’t know what to say, how exactly you did this kind of thing. I wanted to say ‘I love you’ but if I said it and he laughed I would die. More than anything, I wanted him to tell me he loved me. But I couldn’t ask that, the words wouldn’t come, so I just said, ‘Please.’

He stood up and walked over to me, standing close, reached out his hand and oh so gently slowly touched my face, my mouth, with a fingertip, tracing its shape, watching himself as he did it. I wanted more than his finger there, I wanted his mouth to crush down hard on mine, my older, more sophisticated man, I wanted his tongue inside my mouth, to breathe him in and swallow him. I wanted him to possess me. I said it again, ‘Please.’

He said what I already knew in my heart. ‘You’s just a child.’

Even though I knew it was the truth, it was like a physical blow, a super-punch, winding me. All I wanted was someone to love only me, not even for ever, just for a moment, just to know how it felt to be desired, to be the only person wanted by another human being, and he was the only person left to ask and he’d said no. I started to cry. He’d called me a child and it was beyond me to do anything more than act like one. The tears made my humiliation complete. When he tried to pull me into his arms, it was too late. I pushed him away and I ran.

He chased me, calling my name, shouting
Wait!
but I couldn’t stop because I was running away from everything in my life, not just him. On reaching my room, I burst through the door and tried to shut it behind me, but he was already too close, half his body already through, and he flung it open and took me in his arms, kissing me, small pecks, over and over, and when he finally kissed me on the lips I realized I had never lived, that I’d never known anything, that up until that moment I truly had been a youth, that what I’d been doing with oranges had been child’s play.

His mouth possessed me.

His hands, hot hands, found their way inside my dressing gown and he groaned to find my skin bare, like a man lost, his palms gliding over my nakedness, branding trails that in the darkness would have glowed like kryptonite.

There was a hollow near the base of my neck, like the eye of a tornado, which tried to burst through my skin when his teeth scorched that spot and I gasped. Pulling the gown apart his mouth found a place to feed, and as he sucked I thought my legs would finally give, felt a hardness where before only softness had existed, every nerve in my body concentrated in the single nipple parrying his thrusting tongue.

And slowly, oh so slowly, like he didn’t want to scare me, his hand made circles on my stomach, moving lower and lower till he touched me there, through my knickers, where he pressed his fingers and, as if he’d flicked a switch, an electric current surged upwards through me, escaping my mouth in the shape of a moan.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered. ‘Beautiful.’ Then he stopped and sank to his knees and pulled my underwear down. I lifted a single shaking leg to free them, and they fell around the other like an ankle bracelet. He shifted my feet so my legs were more apart, then his fingers touched me there, doing more parting of their own, and then his mouth.

The only thing that kept me standing was the door against my back and I braced myself against it as my heart moved from my pounding chest to the part of me he licked like a lollipop, till it throbbed as if it would burst. Then he stood and undid his belt, and his button, and his zip, and pulled his clothing down and his privates touched my privates then he was in me, filling me, then stuck.

‘Oh my God!’ he groaned. ‘Oh my God!’

He pushed again and something gave and I knew what it was to be filled. He stood perfectly still, his hardness pulsing inside my tightness, his body pressed against mine.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said. Then he kissed me again, sucking my tongue deep into his mouth, one hand under the cheek of my bum, forcing my hips up against his, and the tension in my body rose higher and higher till it burst in a spasm of pleasure so intense that for a moment there was nothing else in the universe. As I came down from the clouds I felt him pull himself out of me, then crush himself against my belly, rubbing himself in the sticky wetness he spurted there, with a grunt. Then we were done.

His body was still against mine for a moment, then he kissed me on the forehead one last time. He didn’t meet my eyes as he hitched his clothes up and tucked away his privates. For some reason, he looked kind of defeated, and I pulled the edges of the gown around me, covering my new body, every part he’d touched, every slippery spot sensitive now to the feel of the fabric over it. He paused on his way out of the door as if he had something to say, but then said nothing. His going left me changed.

I was a woman now and I understood everything. Sam and the garages. This was what happened in the darkness, why everyone kept returning. My mother and Berris. This was why they went to bed early. This was what he was doing with her. Not having this was what she meant by being alone. I understood.

I went to the bathroom and this time I showered. My body felt different to me. I felt different. I stood in front of the mirror afterwards examining my face, trying to see if I could see a physical change, wondering whether others might be able to see it even though I couldn’t. After I put on my pyjamas, I went downstairs to get my dinner. He’d taken it out of the fridge and left it on the table for me.

I thought about carrying it into the front room, where music played still, where he was, but I couldn’t. Something stopped me. Like instead of what we’d done making me feel closer to him it made me feel we’d done something wrong,
I’d
done something wrong. Instead I decided to eat at the table in the kitchen on my own, and I did it as quietly as I could.