A Cupboard Full of Coats (16 page)

‘Grab those,’ he said when he was done.

He picked up two of the glasses on the table and I picked up the other two.

‘The full one’s yours,’ he said. Then, ‘You ready?’

I nodded and we carried the drinks back inside where we handed them out. I sat on the settee and watched Lemon settle himself on the floor in front of the stereo. A moment later, he was transformed into the music maestro.

Music was his passion. It was obvious. He selected records impeccably. He seemed to know exactly what tunes followed perfectly from the one before and his particular skill was setting and maintaining a mood and masterly judging the moment to change it.

He played and they danced.

Berris was a reasonable dancer. Not completely crap, but nothing special either. He had rhythm and he could hold a decent two-step, but nothing that made you want to watch him. On the other hand, my mum was wicked. She was compelling viewing anyway because of her looks, her high colour, her long legs and her perfectly rounded bum that made the back of her jackets fall into the soft curve of a duck’s tail. She had been born to be beheld, and never was she more compelling to watch than when she danced.

She used Berris like he was a maypole, a baton in the hand of a marionette. She used him. In physics, we’d learned about malleability, the property of being able to take on different shapes, of being easy to form and reform, and that was what she was when she danced, malleable. As if her body was the sea, a wave, honey, the wind.

As I watched, I was suddenly overcome by jealousy. I wondered why so much had been given to some and others – specifically me – had been given so little. I discovered that I was even more jealous that she was dancing in front of Lemon, and he rocketed upward in my estimation of him when I realized he was purely focused on the music, glancing at them from time to time, but not with the hangdog openmouthed adoration that Berris exhibited always. Lemon looked like he had even less interest in her than he had in watching Berris dance.

Four or five tracks later, she’d worn Berris out, and Lemon changed the tempo, brought it right down with Esther Phillips, ‘Turn Around, Look at Me’. My mum and Berris melded into one intertwined dancing being, eyes closed, every part of the front of their bodies touching the other somewhere; her head in the curve of his neck, his head folded downwards as if she were his favourite pillow, her arms around his waist, his hands flat against her hip and back, both of them moving so slowly, they were but a fraction of a movement removed from standing still completely.

I was so engrossed in watching them I hadn’t seen Lemon get up, hadn’t realized he’d come over till I felt him tugging me by the arm to stand and, when I did, he pulled me in his direction and we danced.

It was the first time I’d danced with a man. I’d danced with my mother many times, up close, eyes closed, but this was different. Before, I hadn’t thought about my body, hadn’t been aware of it, had instead been consciously counting the beat in my head, like I was at a dance lesson aiming to learn something. With Lemon, however, I was aware of nothing but my body, the shape of it, the quality of every movement and how it would look to him; the jellying of my knees, the drumming of my heart, and the heat that blazed inside my body and intensified on the surface of my skin at every place I felt his slightest touch.

Most things just want a little gentle handling.

He held my waist lightly with one hand, scorching a handprint there for ever, and his other held my free hand, pointing outwards as if we were dancing ballroom, with a respectable distance between our bodies of about a foot or so. His eyes were open, as were mine. It was the first time I’d seen him dance and it was obvious straightaway that he was good. Good enough to be the perfect partner to my mother. The knowledge made me feel even more ungainly.

All I kept thinking was,
This is it. The real thing. I’m dancing my first dance with an older, more sophisticated man and I’m in love, yes I am, oh my God, I love him
. At the same time I was stricken with embarrassment because I knew the way he was dancing with me was because he thought of me as a child when I wanted so badly for him to hold me close and treat me like a woman, to lay my head against his chest and have his arms wrapped around me tight for the rest of my life.

I died a thousand deaths wanting to watch him move, dreading he would catch me doing it, knowing he was watching me and laughing, not out loud, just with his eyes, not at me but
with
me, because he was my older, more sophisticated man and the only person on earth who understood my suffering.

‘Pull up, Mr DJ, come again,’ Berris said and Lemon released me, lifted the needle back to the beginning of the track, turned the volume up a little more, then took me in his arms again, a fraction closer. Though it was a record we’d played many times before, for the first time, as we danced, I found myself listening to the lyrics.

There is someone watching your footsteps,
Turn around, look at me…

He looked through my eyes and into my soul. Though the words came from the stereo speakers, it felt like Lemon was talking to me aloud.

There is someone who really needs you,
Here’s my heart, in my hand.
Turn around, look at me,
Understand, understand…

He knew me. Knew my anguish and how much I was hurting. A witch doctor of rhythm remedy and he was fixing me.

Look at someone who really loves you,
Turn around and look at me…

Releasing my waist he spun me around like a ballerina, with his other hand raised high above my head, holding my hand, then caught me in his arms at the end of the second revolution, closely enough against him for me to feel his heat, and my breath caught in my chest and I felt a rising dizziness that seemed connected from my head to my groin and I don’t know how, but he knew it. I saw in his eyes that he did. And for one totally crazy mind-blowing moment, as our gazes locked, it was inevitable; he was going to kiss me then and there. My real-life Superman.

‘This ain’t no cradle-snatching business, Lem,’ Berris said, and the moment disappeared like a balloon popping, vanishing into the space between us, as Lemon firstly stepped back, then let me go. ‘You better remember you’s a big old married man.’

I hadn’t known he was married till then. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. In my fantasy he’d been single, bowled over by the beauty he suspected lay beneath the darkness of my skin. Passionately in love with me. Ridiculous as it was, I felt like he’d cheated on me.

‘Ease up Berris. They’re just dancing,’ my mum said.

Lemon walked back to the stereo and began flicking through the LPs leaned up against the stereo.

‘You better go buy a guard dog,’ Berris said to my mum and they both laughed. Lemon laughed too, without looking at me, but it was the kind of laugh you laugh when everyone’s laughing at a joke and you don’t want to make it seem like you’re the only person without a sense of humour. I, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing at all.

‘I’m a big old married man,’ he said drily. ‘You don’t need no guard dog on my account,’ but it was me he looked at when he added that last bit and, like my mother, I went crashing from cloud nine straight on to the asphalt.

I’d made an utter fool of myself.

‘I’ve got my biology revision to do,’ I said lamely. ‘I’m going up.’ And as quickly as I could without running, I left the room.

Everything had been inside my head. He’d been laughing at me, not with me. I’d been a total idiot.

Upstairs, with a burning face, I relived the dance while a quiet bass vibrated softly from downstairs and I wondered what his wife was like, how old she was and whether he loved her. Though I felt like the world’s biggest prat, it struck me that the difference in our ages was still smaller than the age gap between my mum and my dad, and that I was only a little younger than she had been when she’d gotten it together with Mr Jackson. Had she felt as I did now? Had she wondered what it felt like to be kissed by him? Had he known and laughed, then taken her? Was it possible that there had been nothing between us, that Lemon had felt nothing for me at all?

His wife had to be a witch, a fat old hag with a crooked nose and feet big as the susquatch, reeking of BO, her chin covered in coarse dark hair. Without a doubt, she was liquorice Mojo black, with pink rubber lips, alopecia and stinking breath. How could he not love me? How could he not?

And what evil, what merciless cruelty existed in the world for the only man I’d ever loved to be already married to another?

Forgotten was my earlier vow; how all would be on my terms, how I’d never let any man make a fool of me. I lay on my bed and sobbed and wept and crushed my hand against my breast in anguish. In the few hours since I’d sworn my vow of strength in love for ever, not only had I fallen head over heels, but I’d also managed to have my heart irreparably torn asunder into the bargain as well.

8

‘When we growed up, back home, that was when things was all right and then things went all wrong. No matter how many times I go over it in my mind, that was where it started.

‘First I give him food, then he become my friend. Then we was like twins, everywhere you see one, the other had to be close by. If it hadda been anywhere else on the planet but for that little island where everybody knowed everything about everyone living there, sure people woulda think we was brothers. Or poofters.

‘We neither of us had brother nor sister to our name. In a way we was the only family the other one had, even thicker than blood. He scratched my back, I scratched his. The more we growed, the tighter we got, and everything was working out cool and dandy. Up to the day I meet Mavis.

‘Up until then, we’d had women. Wasn’t hard to have if you was a working man back home them times with little money in you pocket. I had my share. Shamed to say now was even a couple of times we had the same woman, wasn’t nothing serious, you see. Was like lending you brother a wear of you shirt, allowing you spar a quick spin in you car, nothing serious. Them times in fact it was a laugh. Can’t think of a single woman Berris really like if I’m honest, up until you mum. He was always talking ’bout how is money them looking for, man to take care of them jingbang, all of this kind of thing, on and on till it was like there wasn’t a single woman on the island who had in her body but an honest drop. Every woman for some reason was out to trick. Not sure I believed it all, but didn’t really matter anyhow because up until Mavis, I never found a woman that I felt something for above the waistband, you understand. When she come along, that was the first time I even come to consider what this word was all about that people call “love”.

‘Berris used to say that Mavis musta visit some obeah man; he musta give her some kinda potion that she slip ina my drink when me back turn, because he never see a man turn fool-fool so bad over one woman in him life. And I have to say it was true. Was the first time I ever wanted to spend time with anyone more than I wanted to spend time with him. Before that, even when we had women, they was with us, me and him. When Mavis come along, I suddenly find myself annoyed with Berris. It’s like I only then realize how demanding he was. And he wasn’t no more demanding of me than I was of him, but I’m just trying to tell you how it felt at that time to me.

‘Mavis used to try persuade me to spend more time with him. He blamed her for not seeing me, but if it was down to her, chances are, me and her woulda never have a minute on our own. And I wanted her for my own. I didn’t want to share her with Berris. Yes, it was selfish, but I was young and when you young, you know how it is; the thing you want most, be it a new pair of shoes, or to go to a particular rave, or to spend time with your new girlfriend, that thing is the most important thing in the world and nothing else even come close. So I didn’t share. End up spending so much time just we two on our own, that was probably the reason she end up pregnant so fast.

‘But the other thing was, I
knew
the man. He was already making comments, already telling me things he hear about goings-on with women who match Mavis description and the suchlike. He was jealous of her. Jealous bad. And he’s always been the same, once he’s in a temper, can’t calm him down, have to act out the whole thing and pick up the pieces the next day or the day after, salvage what he can from the little rubble left over. I know two women got involved with Berris round them times and both of them, money or not, refused to sleep with Berris a second time. Truth is, I never want him anywhere near Mavis, because if he started in on his fuckry with her, how I was feeling then, I woulda had to kill him.

‘Anyway, she end up pregnant, he say what him have to say ’bout the chances of the pickney being mine, etcetera, and I marry her. Think I was so vex with him I marry her to teach him a lesson; that from time to time it’s necessary for a man to keep his mouth shut. Afterwards, when she find out what he was walking and telling people, she refuse to have him around her or in our yard. And I can’t say as I blame her, because the man make up all manner of story and he tell two people: Who Ask and Who No Ask. Even so, I still kinda liked her, but because of what he said, it’s like any trust we coulda had was killed stone dead. In a way, that helped things to work out okay. Me and Berris still used to hang round together all the time, work together, rave together, pick up the odd woman here and there and in truth, it was just like old times, ’cept I had the good luck after to come home when night done to find me dinner cook. Know this don’t paint too decent a picture of me them times, but it’s a true one and that’s what I’m aiming at: the God’s honest truth.

‘Everything was fine and running to plan. Even after we leave Montserrat and come to England. He find a little place, then he keep an eye out for another little place for me near by. I get one foot through the door at Lesney’s and I work till I open another door for him. Fine and dandy, everything was running smooth and sweet. Then one day, Berris met you mum.