A Cupboard Full of Coats (15 page)

As if God had been listening and had not approved of my lie, halfway through double French I really
did
come on. With it came period pains so strong I felt nauseous. I hadn’t packed any pads, so I had to go to the office to borrow one. I didn’t want to go back to my lessons and I didn’t want to go home. I returned to the office to ask for a couple of paracetamols and asked for permission to lie down in the sickroom till they took effect. The secretary gave me both.

The sickroom was the best place on earth for a person as wretched as I felt. Small and sterile, empty of everything, even medical supplies. It was like a broom cupboard painted white, with a small camp bed inside it, and on top of that a pillow, and on that a small, thin blanket folded neatly. Just the bed and a chair from one of the classrooms, and in the corner by the window, a small sink. No pictures on the walls, nothing to distract you from the objective of being there: getting well. That morning, the dry, bare space felt like a sanctuary. I was angry with my mum, I was angry with Berris and now I was angry with Sam. For the first time in my life I felt completely alone. And old. Way older than sixteen and I wondered if my childhood was over, if the best and most carefree years of my life were already in the past, and how it had happened that out of the blue my life had become so full of confusion on every front.

At first break Sam came looking for me. She was shamefaced, like she knew she’d been well out of order. After a quick enquiry about how I was feeling, she flopped down on the chair with her arms folded across her stomach, and I swear she looked as unhappy as I felt. It was like the thing with my mum, like again I was still angry, but at the same time I knew she was sorry, and even if I’d wanted to, it was impossible to keep up a stand-offish front, because she looked so miserable.

‘Are you gonna tell me what’s up?’ I asked.

‘I found out Donovan’s been two-timing me,’ she said.

I tried to get my head around that. How he could be twotiming her when she hadn’t told me she was going out with him in the first place and, secondly, I thought she wanted to blow him out, so what difference did it make if he went out with someone else?

‘Oh,’ I said. Even to my ears my response sounded a bit inadequate, so I quickly added, ‘That’s well weird.’

‘All the while he’s been going on like
yeah, baby, I love you
, and the whole time he’s been saying exactly the same thing to some girl Paula, blacker than my bloody dad, with big old doo-doo plaits and buck teeth…’

I started laughing.

‘It’s not funny! He’s been using me, all this time. Just using me,’ she said and,
click!
just like that, it wasn’t funny any more. I went from being a kid to understanding everything: that she’d felt more for him than she’d ever admitted to me; that like my mum, she was heartbroken, that she’d done It. With him.

‘The bastard!’ I said. Her face was getting redder and redder. I reached out and held her hand. She pulled it away.

‘Don’t or I’ll start bawling my head off! Oh God…’ – she stood up. ‘Just thinking about it’s making me feel sick.’

And she was. Sick. A combination of sobbing and vomiting that took us through the rest of the break. It was a lucky thing we were already in the sickroom with the sink right beside her, because if she’d had to make it to the girls’ toilets, there would have been a trail of vomit through half the school all the way behind her. Although she’d come to see me because I was the one who wasn’t well, I ended up having to get up and take care of her. Then, when we went to the office to tell them Sam had been sick and asked if she could stay in the sickroom as well, we ended up getting bawled out and were told we both had to get back to our classes, like we’d been lying and trying to skank our way out of our lessons.

Later, when we were supposed to be revising logarithms in maths with Mr Botha, between my stomach and my thoughts I couldn’t concentrate on a word he was saying. I was lost, trying to get my head around relationships, how different they were in real life to Mills & Boons; how disappointing and seedy and unappealing. And I vowed I would never be like Sam or my mum, never cry over any man, never take their shit, never hand over the reins of my emotions, and I’d kill any man with my bare hands who ever tried to beat me. If what I was seeing was true love, I wanted no part of it. Any man who ever loved me would have to do it on my terms.

And they were: he would be light-skinned and sensitive and gentle and caring. He would be as good-looking as Superman himself, and like all the men in Mills & Boons, he would be mature. And experienced. Most of all, he would never hurt me or use me or do anything to make me cry. If he didn’t match those criteria, he might as well forget it.

And for some very strange reason when I’d thought all that through, it was Lemon who came to my mind; Lemon, with his friendliness, his wide mouth, good looks and laughter.

The older, more sophisticated man.

And I shivered.

They’d been shopping. From the number of bags in the living room, it looked like they must have stopped and bought something from just about every single shop they’d passed on the way to the jewellers. My mother had mentioned marriage only this morning and by the afternoon, there it was.

The ring.

She’d also mentioned babies. Though he’d only been with us for two months, I wondered whether Sam was right, that any day now I’d be hearing the patter of little ostrich-shoed feet. Everything was moving too fast for comfort. It felt like I was playing catch-up.

She showed it to me.

Bling bling!

A white-gold band with a row of gems that twinkled and glittered every time she moved her hand, but no matter how hard they struggled to compete, they were overshadowed by her smile.

Berris said nothing. He sat on the edge of the settee, watching her watching him, the two of them playing games with their faces. It was like a whole language had evolved between them, one I could not speak or understand; whole statements made in the lift of an eyebrow, the puckering of lips, the cutting of eyes, the smiley mouths. Before, they’d had to go to bed to make me feel ignored. Now they were managing to achieve it even while I was in the same room.

He’d bought her a skirt, long and flowing, crinkled silk fit for a gypsy princess, and two pairs of shoes, pointy winklepickers I would have liked to have owned myself. She’d picked him out a bottle of aftershave because he only had like twenty bottles or so in his personal collection so far, and an LP by Roberta Flack, whose voice was strumming my pain with her fingers track by track as it played in the background.

And he’d bought her a real fur coat, a long one that fell from her shoulders to below her knees in thickest, darkest, sleekest brown. It was, without a doubt, the most luxurious and glamorous item of clothing she’d ever owned. It looked like mink, although he said it was just lame old cony fur from rabbits. Fur jackets were the cutting edge of cool and not only had I seen other women in them, but I’d longed for one myself. Hers was the first full-length one I’d come into close contact with, and it was by far the most beautiful coat I’d ever laid eyes on. In it, even I had to admit, she looked like a movie star, and she acted like one too, holding her hand in front of her mouth like a runway to launch the kisses she blew in his direction. All very Marilyn Monroe.

Finally, my surprise was brought out, in a green drawstring bag that identified it immediately. My instinct was to snatch it out of her hands, and it was only the fact that I remembered my age that stopped me.

‘You bought me Dunlop plimsolls,’ I said.

‘Not me,’ she said. ‘
We
.’

There was a time when if my mother had said
we
she’d have meant me and her. Now it was them. She was still a part of
we
; it was me who wasn’t.
They
used to be other people, those who lived outside our home. Now
the
y were inside; it was
me
and
them
.

In my view, it was a blatant case of curryfavouring. The fairy-tale king was becoming a fairy-tale father, so generous he was even prepared to treat the stepdaughter like his beloved own. I’d wanted those Dunlops for nearly a year, yet following fast on the back of the
we
comment, taking them out of the box made me feel ill.

‘Try them on then,’ she said, all excited. ‘See if they fit.’

I toed a moccasin off one foot reluctantly and replaced it with a pristine white plimsoll.

‘Perfect,’ she said, though I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the shoe or this fabulous new life of hers. She paused and waited, then quietly asked, ‘What do you say?’

She’d hoped, I knew, that I’d have said it without the prompt. The words were there all right, clogging my throat, but I had to use the biggest force to get them out.

I glanced at him quickly and feigned a brief smile. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

I felt gutted, like everything in my life was wrong; somewhere I had taken the wrong turning and ended up lost. It was as if my mother’s happiness was in direct proportion to my unhappiness, and any joy I had inside me was being sucked out to double her portion. I was running out of avenues in which to turn, and somehow she’d become oblivious to what I was going through.

Later that evening Lemon came round and, incredibly, I was as happy to see him as if he were
my
friend come to visit. He brought with him a bottle of Appleton’s rum and some sweets in small white bags; a quarter of aniseed twist, a quarter of Tom Thumb pips, and a half-pound of pear drops, which he was particularly partial to; big ones encrusted in sugar, which cut the roof of your mouth if you got a bit impatient while you were sucking them.

I appreciated the sweets more than the plimsolls I’d so longed for. To me it was as if he’d actually been thinking of me and had made an effort to
not
make me feel left out, and it was ironic, because of everyone in the house at that moment,
he
was the outsider, the one I should have felt furthest from. Instead I felt closer to him than either Berris or my mum.

Lemon was the perfect house guest. He took no liberties. He didn’t walk in with his bare hands swinging, dishing out demands. Not only did he not expect to be waited on, but he seemed to be on the lookout for chances to be useful. Why couldn’t my mother have gone out with him instead? How much easier was he to get on with, to be around?

After dinner, he offered everyone drinks and it was Berris who told me to get up and give Lemon a hand, as though he was too busy to do it himself, and I was some sponger just sitting around scratching my backside. I went with Lemon to the kitchen where he made himself busy, collecting glasses, pouring liberal swigs into them and topping them up with the chaser.

‘You just worry ’bout the ice,’ he said with a smile, and I went to the freezer and pulled the tray out of the drawer. It was the gentleness in his voice and the smile that really did it to me.

I held it out to him and he took it from my hands, then asked, ‘What’s up?’

There is a moment when there is so much stored up inside it’s like you could burst, when anger is the only way you can hold it together and just about keep it all in, when even the smallest act of kindness will push you over the edge, into the abyss of the bawlers. His question caught me in that moment. It was impossible to answer, way way way too vast. And everything that was wrong welled up in my throat and eyes thicker and faster the harder I tried to regain the smallest driest dregs of self-control. Suddenly all was lost and the tears spilled and I started to cry. Not any normal kind of crying, but the kind where once you start you need to cry up everything inside you, and nothing short of exhaustion or dehydration will allow you to stop.

He didn’t say,
Hey, stop that
. Or,
Don’t you worry, it’ll all be okay
. Or,
What is it? Why are you crying like this?
He didn’t even seem uncomfortable. The way he pulled me into his arms was natural. Like a father might have done, and he didn’t need me to say a thing, as if my tears themselves were a language he understood and I didn’t have to say a word.

I cried buckets. It was like I’d started out as a rain cloud and when the tears stopped, I’d become a fluffy white one hanging in a pale blue sky, basking in the light of Lemon, the sun. He released me then, went and pulled off a strip of kitchen roll and handed it to me to blow my nose. It was abrasive, scraping the rims of my nostrils like a scourer as I blew and blew, then wiped. Finally, testing my choked voice box, I uttered the word ‘Nothing’. And he laughed.

‘Well I’m glad it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘If it was
something
, we woulda need to call out the coast guard.’

I sniffed and involuntarily smiled.

‘That’s better,’ he said.

And to my surprise, I actually did feel better.

‘Thank you.’

‘S’no big deal. Most things, all they want is a little gentle handling.’

He put the last touches to the drinks and dropped in the ice cubes, then tidied up behind himself, putting everything back in its rightful place. He even wiped the cupboard sides down and when he’d finished, if you had come into the kitchen afterwards, you would never have known he’d been there at all. I don’t know why, but that impressed me. Berris was meticulous about grooming himself. His shirts and trousers were ironed to perfection and at the point of his putting them on they were faultless, the seams brought to the zenith degree of sharp, which he admired in silence while running his clothes brush over them back and forth, removing microscopic specks that were invisible to every eye but his own. But on a domestic level, he seemed to expect – and my mother was happy to oblige – that everything was done for him. He sat like a god, entertaining himself with his music while she cooked, coming to the table to find his plate awaiting him, and when he was finished he just leaned back to let his food go down, and shortly after, as if by magic, she’d appear and take it away. Perhaps because Berris was the first man in my life – I couldn’t really count my dad because I didn’t remember enough about him – I’d come to think that maybe that was just how men were. But Lemon was different.