A Cupboard Full of Coats (24 page)

We danced.

It was as it had been when I was sixteen, the same headiness, the surprising want I hadn’t known I had the capacity to feel. I felt a pounding against my ribcage and I truly could not say whether it came from my heart or his.

We kissed.

It was for me as if it were the first kiss. As if we had risen a few inches from the ground, and the world continued to revolve around our stationary bodies as they hovered lip to lip conjoined.

I felt him.

He moulded me against him, forcing my heat against his hardness, danced that part of his body against mine there.

He danced.

And when the track ended, I began to unrobe him, tugging with desperate hands that shook as I struggled to untie the knot that held his dressing gown together and me outside it. But he put his hands over mine and stopped me. He leaned his cheek against mine and I felt the hot air from his lips fill my ear as he whispered, ‘Not here.’

He turned the lights off, asked me to keep the coat on, and we lay down on the bed in the room where my mother had slept and died. The drag of his tongue scorched my skin, and despite the fact that I drenched them, his fingertips burned. In the darkness his mouth found my lips. He kissed them and said a single word, ‘Beautiful.’ He manoeuvred himself into position above me and when I gasped, I found my lungs filled with her scent. As he repeated the word over and over again, my need grew too desperate for patience, and my release was both swift and intense.

And after, when I thought I was done, gently, he eased me onto all fours on that bed. I felt him shifting himself, shifting me, and in spite of the heat I shivered. Then finally, he took me on my knees like a dog, and I thew back my head and I howled.

13

‘Was a friend of a friend’s do. A fella from work. Was me who invited Berris and your mother to come. Those days was different, you see, not like now. The chap having it was from Montserrat and them times, any party hold by someone from back home was a open invitation for any Montserratian to pass. You just needed to know where you was going, pick up you bottle on the way, and reach.

‘Man, I was like some kinda crazy dog. In some kinda stupid love. Knew full well she was his but I wanted her anyhow. Knew full well she wanted him and I hated him for it. I told Berris the details, but I told him we wasn’t gonna leave till eight. Was such a silly lie, because all it took was for you mother and Berris to talk on the subject and they woulda known I give them different information. Was a bit of a gamble, and I already had my excuse to hand in case that happened. Woulda just tell Berris ah no me tell him eight, that I’m sure it’s six me say. Woulda say his mind too full up of love for him to think straight. But it never came up. In a way seemed like the gods was on my side. Finally that night it seemed the gods was on my side.

‘Man, I felt like Cinderella for true. She spent the night watching out for Berris and I spent the night watching her. I kept thinking this was how it would be if she was mine, if something happened to Berris and it was just me and her. I knew, I knew for a fact, that us leaving without him woulda piss him off something chronic. Knew clear as day that someone was gonna pay for the few hours of pleasure I stole. But I’ve often wondered since, if I hadda known, truly known how things woulda turn out that night, could I have done different? Would I have waited for him and missed the chance to spend a whole night with her, just we two? And I tell myself of course I’da waited, of course I woulda, over and over, like if I said it the right number of times it would be so, and in my head the answer wouldn’t be followed up by the same old question that always mocked me after:
For true?

‘I danced with her and I danced with her and I danced with her. Had Berris’ve reached, I woulda end up dancing on my own while the two of them cootch up one side holding up the wall, ’cos he couldn’t dance but the two steps and she woulda stood up stiff alongside him to keep the peace. But with him gone, man we put down some piece of dancing that night. Wasn’t a man alive who wouldna killed to be in my place. Not one.

‘How I kept my lips off her, I can’t say. All I know is that two o’clock, when our transport was ready to drop us back, I never walked to the car, man, I floated.

‘On the way back she started getting worried proper. She knew Berris would be vex. Knew it. She’d had licks for a lot less, and she knew he wouldn’t see her going raving without him in any kind of happy light. Me, I played stupid. The man wasn’t there on time, so what could we do? We leave him the address, didn’t we? I’d had a bit to drink that night anyhow and by that time the dancing was done. I just wanted to get home to my yard, take out on the wife the little excitement that I couldn’t take out on you mum. She wanted me to come in with her, but I told her she was being foolish. He would understand, she would see. At the end of the day, she never done nothing wrong, is it? Then don’t act like it! But the truth is, I had my own reasons why I never wanted to go inside and face him.

‘I knew I had stirred things up, bare-face lie to the man and all, that what I had done to him that night had nothing to do with friendship. I’d been coveting my spar’s woman, that was the bottom line, and what with the drinks I’d already had, I didn’t wanna fuck up any explanations. Knew he woulda give her a couple of licks, but I thought that woulda been that, afterwards, everything cool as usual, and the three of us just move on. This was what was on my mind as I ease her out of the car and pat her on the shoulder, like
there there, off you go
, then got back in the car and let my man drive me home to my yard.

‘Other funny thing that strikes me: I ask my man to wait till you mother got herself inside the house, watch as she root down her handbag for the keys, till she open up the door, turn on the passage light, and give us a wave before she close it back then lock up behind her.

‘In my mind, you see, it wasn’t safe for a woman to be on her own on the street, late at night. Anything coulda happen to her. You take a woman out, you see her back safely inside her yard, that’s the way I was brought up, that’s what I was thinking.

‘Knowing what I know now, I realize I knew about Jack shit. She woulda been safer on the street. She mighta been alive today if she’d slept the night over Hackney Downs, or in some alley, or on the floor of a shebeen. I waved back to her from where I sat in the car,
grinning
, my mind like a camera, taking her image for ever to visit again and again in the time thereafter; this was how she looked after I drop her home, smiling and waving
at me
. I never hadda inkling, no idea at all, that inside this house was the most dangerous place she coulda ever have step that night. Not a clue.’

He was quiet in the darkness, holding me spooned tightly against him, the leather of the coat between our skins, part of us, rubbing my bare stomach gently with the soft, warm palm of his hand. When he continued speaking, his voice was filled with the utmost weariness.

‘And sometimes, over the last fourteen years, some nights I can’t sleep and she’s on my mind, and I’m wide awake tossing and turning, because the one thing I’ve always said was that I
knew
Berris. Knew him well, knew exactly how he thought and what he might do. And I find myself troubled, because I think that maybe, when I was wiggling my fingers in the air, and feeling the rock between my legs on the journey home, maybe I knew exactly what woulda happen the moment he got hold of her and there was no one around to help. Maybe I knew.’

He blamed himself. All these years he had been thinking he was responsible. He thought it had all been down to him and what he had done. I knew how that felt, the dark places that kind of thinking took a person. It confirmed for me again that he had never come close to guessing, he had no idea of the part I had played, the responsibility I alone bore. He blamed himself, this man I thought I could love, and it was precisely that reason I was able to tell him the truth, to speak it for the first time since she had died, to say the words aloud that I had swallowed and held down, then spent over a decade pretending they hadn’t existed at all. The darkness helped too, the fact that he couldn’t see me and I wouldn’t have to see his face turn over in disgust. He felt the sudden tension in my body and when his hand stopped moving, it was like a question.

I said, ‘I’m the one to blame. It was my fault.’

He actually laughed. ‘You was a child. Nothing that happen that night was down to you.’

His mind would not allow him to go there, yet I needed it to. Needed someone else to share my terrible secret, to understand me, needed him to know, this man who’d always known me better than anyone else, who had, like me, made a banquet of jealousy and grudge. I needed him to know exactly who I was and what I was capable of. And I said it.

‘I never gave Berris the address.’

*

From the time they shut the front door behind them, my mind was made up and closed to any other alternative. I didn’t want Berris around me or in our home or in her life. I wanted him gone and I was prepared to do what I had to do to make that happen.

What right did she have to be happy, to have so much? How did she earn the right to glow like that? What about me and what had happened to me? What about that man and what he’d done? Maybe he had a right to do what he did to her because she
chose
to tolerate and accept it. But he had no right to do what he had done to me, with her knowledge, in my father’s house. In my mind, they had both gone too far.

The address.

I looked at the sheet of paper without reading. I had neither interest nor curiosity in the details. It was enough for me to know it existed, his passport to join her on her merry night. Slowly, I ripped it neatly and longways in half, then quarters, then eighths, then into the smallest pieces I could manage.
That
was the act that made the whole thing irrevocable. From then, we were all committed to playing out the scenario I had set up for us, as compromising as a tram track. I would pretend I had lost it, that was the initial plan, or what I told myself at any rate. When Berris came home, I would tell him I’d lost the note and couldn’t find it. And that would be that.

I knew him, knew him as well then as I thought anyone could, knew he was crazy. He would drive himself into a rage by the time she came back and when he saw how she looked he would be even angrier. He would imagine men had glanced at her, that they had wooed her, that she had danced with them, rubbed up against them. He might even think she’d thought of leaving him. Such was the train of his thoughts, the landscape of his imaginings. Even though I was only sixteen, the way his mind worked was so elementary a child could work it out.

And I did.

He’d give her the hiding to beat all hidings. Hopefully it would knock a bit of sense into her and she would finally chuck him out and we – as in us, her and me – could move forwards with our lives and Berris would be nothing more than a bad dream we reflected on from time to time. That was what I thought. Or what I told myself I thought.

Then I had to decide what to do with all the pieces. I didn’t want to leave the remnants in the bin in case he found them, so I ended up flushing them down the toilet. It must’ve taken ten flushes to get rid of it all and I still had to pick three floating bits out and roll them into papier mâché pips that I flicked to the bottom of the bathroom bin. After that there was nothing more to be done so I went to my room to do some chemistry revision while I waited. I was calmer than I’d been in weeks and the revision went well.

He arrived back about an hour after they had left, slamming the front door hard as he came in. I felt the reverberations upstairs and that moment was the first time I questioned the unchangeable course I’d embarked on.

Even though he’d just come through the door and had no idea what awaited him, he was already pissed off. I knew the space between him being pissed off and in a rage was gossamer thin. It was already a thousand times worse than I’d anticipated and nothing had even happened yet. I wished I hadn’t torn that piece of paper up and, what’s more, flushed the pieces away for ever, but it was too late. I hadn’t even read it, so it wasn’t as if I could knock out a few of the details myself. At that point my mother hadn’t crossed my mind at all. He had come in and I felt afraid, but not for her. Every fearful thought I had, I had for me alone.

He called her. Shouted her name at the top of his voice. If it had been written down, there would have been no question mark to follow the word. He wasn’t making an enquiry, it was a demand. Twice more he shouted into the silence. His footsteps pounded up the stairs heavy and quick. I heard the sound of her bedroom door being thrown open and then he swore.

He walked back along the landing to my room and, without knocking, walked straight in and marched up to me so fiercely I thought he was going to grab me or knock me down, but he didn’t. He looked like he wanted to though, like it was an effort not to give in to the urge. He paused between each word.

‘Where. Is. Your. Mother?’

If there had been a moment when I wanted to come clean it was then, and if I hadn’t torn the note up I would have. But with the note gone for ever, it was impossible. If I mentioned it, I’d be expected to produce it, and there was no explanation I could come up with to explain why it had been torn up and flushed away, no explanation that spread the responsibility for that act to include anyone else along with me. And while all this was going round and round inside my head, the way he was poised, as if any moment he would let loose a cuff or slap or punch, made me feel pressured to respond quickly, to say something,
anything
, and my mouth moved of its own accord and the words simply tumbled out.

‘I don’t know.’

‘
You don’t know?
’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What, she never tell you where she was going?’

I shook my head, everything compounding, getting worse the more I spoke, and desperately, I tried to find a way back, but I was already hemmed in by the solid wall that had sprung up behind me, its foundations in my footprints.