A Cupboard Full of Coats (21 page)

He came in while I was still there, and I think he felt the same. He smiled, but it was brief, tight, forced. He hummed as he poured himself a drink, as if everything was normal, but he was styling it and I knew it. He moved quickly and was out the room before I’d had a chance to think of a single thing to say to him.

I wondered whether he was, like me, thinking of what we’d done. Did he see me differently now, and if he did was it different good or different bad? And would we do it again? Should I let him? Then I remembered his wife and I felt gutted. All the things that stood in the way of our love struck me at once: he was Berris’s friend, he was much older, he was married, I was still, for two months anyway, a schoolchild. He was probably thinking of these things too, not me, not love, just the wrongness.

Though all of these thoughts should have reduced my appetite, I waxed off the food on my plate as if I hadn’t eaten for days. Afterwards, I scurried as quietly as I could through the passage, up the stairs to my room, and for the rest of the night I stayed there, lost in my thoughts, marvelling at my life and all the things that just kept coming at me, at what felt like the length and breadth of the world’s experiences, all concentrated inside the smallest possible amount of time.

10

I had to get out. To clear my head. I washed my face and threw on some clothes, desperate to escape the place that for so many years had been my cocoon against the world, the safest hiding place until he came. I shouldn’t have let him in, allowed him to weigh me down with his stress-filled tales, his protracted exhumation of all things buried deep. I pushed my purse into my jacket pocket, pulled back the hundred tiny braids he’d plaited into a ponytail, wrapped a scarf around my neck and left. I felt like a tightrope walker who’d been carefully balancing for years, suddenly given a hard boot in the back.

It was Sunday, still early, and the streets of Hackney were quiet. In a few hours they would be as busy as any workday rush hour, but at that time of the morning it was almost peaceful. It was typical English early spring. From inside, through the window, the day looked bright, but what I stepped out into was a biting cold. The sun played without warmth or humour against crystallized car windscreens and on every exhalation, my breath smoked.

The only other people on the streets were sedate, the churchgoers, outfitted in their Sunday finest, on their way to pray. I had never gone to church as a child, never had religion. But that morning I envied them. How I wished I had faith, that I believed in a greater, grander plan, that everything was part of some clever design and for a purpose. More than anything I wished I had it in me to pray.

I walked towards Dalston, my pace brisk yet still too slow when what I wanted to do was run. I turned off Dalston Lane, right on to Ridley Road where the great clean-up was underway from yesterday’s market; the road filled with the noise of motor-powered vacuum cleaners and the relaxed chatter of shopkeepers leisurely straightening things up. There would be business done today, Sabbath or not. My pace increased.

This was where she had shopped, my mother, rummaging through cardboard boxes of moist compost for the freshest cassava, the least blemished christophine, delicately breaking ginger root with her fine, slim fingers, pressing and testing the ripeness of the choicest green sabaca. The men here paid compliments to the women who bought from them. They flirted and rounded prices down to numbers divisible by ten.

My route took me up to the high street, past the pound shops with their cheap wares piled high and broad in primarycoloured plastic baskets, past Cash Converters and the charity shops, the bookies and the fluorescent off-licences with their neon-lit signs, past the distinguished undertakers with their high-shine wood and stone exhibited through speckless, pristine glass.

She had told Berris and he had told Lemon. Why had I been left out of the loop? How was it that even dead she still had the power to make me feel insignificant?

Inside the supermarket I took a deep breath of air, chilled and void of odour. The tension in my body began to abate. Here, the produce was set out in orderly rows, the fruits and veg and meat sanitized and attractively presented in neat polystyrene packages. I found the symmetry calming, the parallel aisles and shelving, the neat-stacked rows, the square labels and barcodes, the clean smooth walls.

I took a trolley, not because I intended to buy much, just for the feel of the roll of the wheels as I wandered round. I stocked up on the essentials; a litre-sized bottle of vodka, a bag of ice and four more bottles of wine. Even to my eyes, the contents of my trolley looked like they belonged to someone with serious alcohol issues, so I had a wander around the store in case there was anything else I needed. In the bread aisle, I put a loaf of brown bread into my trolley before noticing the hard dough bread on the shelf below. I knew Lemon would prefer hard dough, so I took the brown bread out and the hard dough in. As soon as I had bagged and paid for everything, I knew I’d bought too much. Or maybe I should have brought the car with me. In any case, like the ongoing story of my life, it was too late for regret.

Outside it was drizzling. Lightly at first, gradually getting heavier the closer I got to home. I walked slowly, feeling oppressed both by the weight of the shopping and the weather, yet still reluctant to get back to where I lived. It felt like my distress was in direct proportion to the distance from home, and the closer I came to it the worse I felt. I so wanted to cry.

But it was impossible to say what I should cry for. For Mavis? For Lemon and Berris and Ben? For murderers who went to jail or those who lived on the outside in jails of their own making? For the brother or sister I could have had, whose loss was no less for the fact that I hadn’t, till today, even known they’d existed?

By the time I took the corner into the road I lived on I was drenched. On the doorstep I put down a bag, searching my pockets for the key. Unexpectedly, the front door opened and Lemon was there, standing inside, awaiting my soggy entry with red-rimmed eyes so shiny it was evident he had been crying himself.

I passed him without a word, through the door, the hallway, into the kitchen, where at last I was able to put the carrier bags down. He followed close behind me, then as I turned, he half stepped, half fell towards me, hands going up and around my back, crushing me hard against him. He buried his face in the bowl of my collar bone, heaving and snorting, adding his wet distress to the rain on my neck. My body was stiff as he clasped me tight. And over and over and over again, he just kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry.’

I laid in the bath for hours, topping up the cooling water regularly, unpicking the plaits he had been so patient putting in. I finished when the hot water ran out. I stood then and stepped out. I was slow to dry my skin and, for the first time ever, I could not be bothered to wash the bathtub out afterwards, so I left it.

He was sitting there, obediently, on the floor outside the bathroom door, like a faithful hound; had maybe been there the whole time I was in the bath, just waiting. I didn’t look at him as I walked past and he didn’t speak, but I heard the rustle of his clothing as he began to move, following behind me as I entered my room.

He sat on the bed as I towel-dried my hair, discarded the towel, creamed my skin, combed through and then blowdried my hair. He watched in silence, with an expression I was unable to fathom, but which was not anger or madness or lust.

I felt removed. As though my spirit had vacated my body and broken free to glide overhead, observing my life from a detached perspective, seeing my bedroom, the bed, a weeping man’s arms wrapped tightly round himself, a naked woman on a stool, two fingers deep inside a hair-grease tub.

And when I had finished, there was nothing left, not even the energy to find a nightie or a pair of knickers, I just crawled into the bed and he covered me and sat down beside me, gently rubbing the back I had turned on him as I closed my eyes and willed sleep to take me, willed eternal sleep to take me, please. I slept.

He was gone when I awoke naked beneath the quilt. The room was fresh and I pulled the bedding closer around my neck, trying to make sense of what was happening to me. I couldn’t recall ever sleeping in my birthday suit. In fact it was so out of character for me that the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that I was having a nervous breakdown, and the possibility didn’t surprise me in the least. What did surprise me was that it had taken so long to occur.

My son.

I slipped out of bed and went over to the dressing table, into the least used bottom drawer, where I took out a box and carried it back to the bed. I leapt into the warmth beneath the quilt, took my nightie from under the pillow and pulled it on. I opened the lid of the box and there he was, Ben, two months ago, at Christmas, in a photo taken by his dad at his house, in front of the tree, surrounded by presents, eyes round with wonder. Red had invited me to join them but I hadn’t. I told him I had already been invited to a friend’s, then spent the loneliest day of the year on my own.

His eyes.

Looking into his eyes had always disturbed me. I dug deep down into the box and found a picture of him when he was six months, and there they were again.

Her eyes.

His skin was a shade darker than hers had been, his hair a short crop of shiny jet curls, cheeks fat as hamsters’, but there they were, my mother’s eyes, love-me eyes, so big you could get lost just staring into them. Was that what kept making it so hard for me to love him? Her?

I went back to the Christmas photo and touched his face. Though not as fair as her he was still way lighter than I was. I had never been able to judge whether he was a goodlooking kid or just light-skinned, like some people thought all blonde women were beautiful when in fact they were just blonde. I would stare at him, trying to judge as a parent with some objectivity, not wanting to be one of those people who treated lightness and blondness as some kind of independent beauty criteria. There was no doubt his eyes were compelling, but did they alone make him handsome? I still couldn’t say. Looking at him, all I could say for sure was that in that photo he looked happy, utterly happy. And complete.

Was this how my brother would have looked?

Would I have found it easier to love my brother than my son? Or a sister?
Their
daughter. How was it possible to experience grief for someone I couldn’t even be certain it would have been possible to love?

And Ben; what was I really doing with him? I hadn’t rung him or his dad, hadn’t felt outrage or loss or grief at the thought I might never see him again. Instead I was making plans to go to Citizen’s Advice. For what? It wasn’t as if I actually
wanted
him, wasn’t as if I longed to have him here with me full time. If it were that simple I could have gone to the police, accompanied them to Red’s and collected Ben, as per my legal rights. But I didn’t want that. What I wanted was what I’d had before, nothing more and nothing less: for Red to look after him and for me to have him every second weekend, here, not there, like some paedophile having supervised contact, Red breathing his advice down my neck while taking notes, judging. Because I had given birth to him and I had the right. What kind of reason was that for me to base a relationship on? With as much emotion as you’d find on a yellow legal pad. My feelings had nothing to do with love and everything to do with ownership. What kind of person was I?

I put the photos back inside the box. When I replaced the cover it fell into place as securely as a coffin lid. I pushed the box under the bed and lay back down. The tears came fast and unstoppable then. On a roll.

He’d cooked oxtail and butter beans for dinner, with small round dumplings the size of marbles, brought it to me in my bedroom on a tray, waited while I adjusted the pillows behind my back and smoothed a level space on the duvet for him to put it down. He sat on the bed near my feet and watched as I ate. The meat was so tender it fell from the bone, melting inside my mouth, the gravy spicy and so compelling I found myself unable to stop eating even when the plate was empty, sucking out every crevice of the bones, using my mouth like a bottom-feeder, my tongue like a young girl French-kissing an orange.

I thought I had been creative about food in the past, ensuring a balance of texture and colour and nutrients, attractive to the eye, contrasting on the palate, on inspection, perfect in every respect. But everything he had cooked since his arrival had been divine. I could not recall any dish I had ever prepared that had an impact like this, that was such a dizzying, seductive, overwhelming experience that the more I ate, the more I wanted. Even how I was feeling, with all the emotions I was carrying inside – the confusion, the distress, the impact of new hurt piled on top of the old – my appetite was so great it surprised me.

Like gorging at a funeral.

He watched.

‘You want more?’

I shook my head.

‘Then we should talk.’

‘No more talking. Please. I can’t take any more.’

‘What no kill you, make you strong.’

‘I think it will kill me.’

‘You’s so like you mum. There’s nothing you can’t cope

with.’

‘She didn’t cope. She’s dead.’

‘I can’t understand why she never tell you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘How can anything upset you that much not matter?’

‘I don’t wanna do this. It’s too late. There’s no point raking up ancient history. What difference can it make?’

‘I have to say it make a big difference to me.’

‘Because you
loved
her?’ The words were sneered. He
had
loved her, loved her in one of the many forms his love took, love that he chose not to distinguish from envy, or anger, or madness. ‘You both did, didn’t you? Loved her to death!’

He flinched.

‘You’s just like him,’ he said. ‘How he was them times…’

‘Don’t compare me to him!’

’Cept he use his foot and his fist where you use you mouth.’