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.
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 r
emembered 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 qu
ilt, 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.
A Cupboard Full of Coats Page 16