‘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 wa
s 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.
‘But she was dress up?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She went out with Lemon.’
‘Dress up in her fine clothes and covered in perfume, she gone out with Lemon and she never leave word where them a go?’
If only he had stepped back beyond arm’s reach, given me just enough space to draw from the air the courage I needed to confess, but he didn’t. His voice was in the realm beyond calm, like when he came to my room before to beat me. Like when he spoke after turning the music off at the party. I didn’t think about what would happen later, when she did get back and told him she’d given me the address to give to him, had no idea what I would say to him then – if he gave me the chance to speak. Sitting on my bed looking up at him, I knew only that there was no one in the house but us two and that he would hurt me bad. I looked down at the bed as I shook my head. I sensed him move and flinched, bracing myself for a blow that never came. Instead, he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that it rebounded open with a crash, and with my heart somersaulting inside my chest, I realized I’d been holding my breath and began again to breathe.
He cleaned the house. I could hear him from my bedroom, scraping the bath and the shower out, the wet cloth slapping against the tiles and floor, using so much bleach and disinfectant that even with my door closed, the smell was gagging.
Then he was downstairs, in the kitchen, doing something similar; in the living room, covering every surface with furniture polish and wiping; sweeping the stairs, cleaning down the banisters, then the Hoover was out and he went at it hard, upstairs and down. I’d never even seen him take his own plate to the sink before. I wondered if cleaning was some kind of therapy, a thing you did to contain your anger. It struck me as very weird. But then he struck me as very weird. In that respect alone, what he was doing made some kind of sense.
The only room he didn’t clean that night was mine and maybe that was because I was in it. Maybe if he had tried to clean my room he wouldn’t have been able to keep his hands off me. Maybe he was concerned that, as before, he would have ended up tiring himself out on me, and was making a conscientious effort to preserve his strength for when she finally came back.
I couldn’t revise or read or sleep. My head was so full, the only thing I could do was think. I had no idea how I was going to get through the night in one piece, what exactly I was going to say when she told him, as she certainly would without a shadow of a doubt, that the address had been left with me, in my hands, with clear instructions to pass it to him. Not only hadn’t I done that, I’d lied and said I didn’t know where they were.
What had possessed me? Why had I done it? The short time I had spent living with Berris had taught me much about fear, how infinite its heights were. Even so, the level I experienced was beyond anything even I could have imagined. Maybe that was why, as the hours slowly passed, it did not even cross my mind what he would do to her, how what I’d said might impact on her. I knew too well how efficiently he could hurt me, and the beating I’d had before had been because he had a suspicion about me, nothing concrete, not a fact. How much worse would my punishment be for this, this lie so terrible it had driven him to clean the whole house?
I heard him making food in the kitchen. Opening cupboards, clacking plates, putting a pot on the cooker, opening and closing the fridge door. My mother had cooked saltfish and ackee before she’d gone out. He gave out coats to say sorry and she made food. I could smell it warming up, and when it was ready he called me. Despite the fact that it was late and I’d had no dinner, I had no appetite. I had even less desire to eat with him. But I thought if I didn’t go down it would make things worse, which was ridiculous really, because things were already as bad as it was possible for them to be.
In the kitchen, he’d set up two places at opposite ends of the table, the hot food steaming on both. I sat down in front of the plate that had the smallest portions and waited for him to sit down as well. She’d also baked Johnnycakes, and he’d given me two. He brought a bowl of cucumber salad to the table and put it down in the middle of us both. He didn’t look me in the face. I thought it was because he was embarrassed.
He’d been crying. Like the day he’d come back with Lemon. His eyes were red, the bags beneath them swollen. His nose was red and he looked as though he was exerting a superhuman effort not to break down and carry on bawling his head off in front of me. I tried not to look at him. I tried not to feel sorry for him. It was beyond me to understand how it was possible to feel sorry for a person who had done what he’d done to me, what he would do to me again once he found out what a barefaced liar I was. My feelings confused and disturbed me. I tried my hardest to focus on dinner, concentrated hard on not glancing his way at all.
He sniffed. Over and over. Like a child. Worse than any child. And picked at the food with such reluctance that a person coming in might have thought I’d called him down to dinner and told him he had to sit there till he’d finished it. My nerves were stretched to their limit. My mind raced, trying to find a way to work with his distress to my benefit. Surely, if I supported him through this difficult time, it would be harder for him to rip me up afterwards, even when the truth did come out? But what to say? I didn’t want to mention the tears. To be honest, he looked as though he was the tiniest fraction away from breaking down completely. Mentioning my mother might not take the conversation in the kind of direction I needed it to go either. I couldn’t think of anything other than what I said in the end.
‘I’m sorry.’
He was silent for a moment, then he put down his cutlery and picked up the glass beside his plate. It looked like Coke and ice, but I could smell the rum as he gulped, whether from the glass or him I couldn’t say. When he put the drink down he was blinking fast in an attempt to hold back the tears, but it was useless. When the dam broke, he began wiping them quickly away, but it was like shovelling before the snow stopped falling and shortly, he gave up and just left them to run down his face.
‘Why has she done this to me?’ he asked. ‘What is it I don’t give this woman and she still treat me so, like a fool, like a bups, like I’m some kind of idiot, fucking bitch.’
It was his tone that chilled me. I could not have vocalized it then, pinned down precisely what freaked me out about it, but it was the monotone he spoke in, the lack of passion, love or hate, as though he was beyond feeling, beyond hurt, the fact that he spoke like that while crying. It was the incongruity that got me.
‘What kinda woman could just up and leave so? Not even care a shit ’bout nothing she left behind, even her kid.’
Stunned, I realized he was talking about me, about my mother and me, about her not caring, not loving me. My greatest fear confirmed by the man who knew. His nose was running now, his face a sodden, slimy mess. Eyes wild. He stood up and began clearing the table, though technically dinner wasn’t finished. I leaned back as he took up my plate and began scraping food on to his.
‘I’m gonna bus’ her arse for her tonight, you watch! I’m gonna teach her a lesson she won’t forget. I’m gonna make sure she never does this to anyone again.
Ever. And that’s not a threat, it’s a promise.’
He took the dishes over to the sink, placed them on the side, then turned and left the room.
For the first time, it struck me that bad as my position was, my mother’s was even worse. This crazy, violent man would hurt her even more than he would hurt me. And it would be my fault. Not only had I done wrong but, to top it off, I’d lied. I felt guilty and ashamed and afraid. Guilty that my mother would be made to pay for my wrongdoing. Ashamed that I did not have the courage to go to him then and there and confess. But I was in the house with him, alone. Even if I screamed my head off, no one would help me. Isolated and vulnerable, I was afraid.
For myself.
And then I thought about what he’d said and, actually, it was true. She had left me behind without a care or thought. That was all she’d done since he’d come to live here. It wasn’t just this party tonight, it was her life, their whole lives that I was excluded from. I was the last thing she thought of now.
And my skin still bore the evidence. Too vividly I remembered what he had done, what she had allowed him to do to me. When she got in he’d give her the roasting to beat all roastings, a beating so bad that to say sorry, the coat he’d have to buy her would need to be mink, lined with purest silk, and buttons made from rubies and precious gems, and I would watch from the shadows to see whether this time her beaten body would pirouette and curtsy, modelling it before him, all the while smiling.
A Cupboard Full of Coats Page 19