A Cupboard Full of Coats (23 page)

The whole street must have heard.

But no one came.

The whole world must have known what he was doing to me and not a single person did anything to stop him. If I’d thought I felt alone before, it was nothing to how I felt after, lying on my bed, body aflame, full of disbelief and fury, unable to do a single thing about what he’d done to me but cry. Lying there, I vowed I’d never make the mistake ever again of counting on anyone in any circumstance to help me. I’d never expect protection. I had thought Lemon had made me a woman, but I was wrong. I’d been a little girl who’d had sex. It was Berris who’d taken me from the realm of childhood into adulthood, made me like one of those people in the Before and After adverts; the person before the beating, the person I became after. Lying there I promised myself whatever happened in my lifetime, I would always remember I was in it on my own.

And as for my mother, everything I’d ever felt for her, the envy, the confusion, the sympathy, the annoyance, the admiration, the frustration, the love, that man removed every one of those feelings. I had a single feeling left, so thick and complete it would be with me till the day I died, so strong I couldn’t even speak it. She’d stood by and let the man she had chosen, the man she brought into my father’s house, wear himself out on my skin, without lifting a finger to stop him, not even a word or gasp or whisper. She’d cast me aside and out as if I were nothing. No matter what she said, I would never forgive her, and I promised myself that no matter what came after, I would never forget it.

Ever.

12

In glorious high-definition Technicolor, complete with stereosurround sound, the memories in my mind played out like the trailer of a film: a baritone roaring, a soprano scream, the ripping of a paper sheet into a hundred tiny pieces of confetti. My mind kept stepping back, trying to keep to the shadows around the edges, resisting, avoiding, terrified, and all the while my heart hammered inside my chest as hard as if it were tunnelling up for air.

I drank.

Enough to have taken me beyond the point of recall, lucidity, or even consciousness. I should have been legless, passed out in an unthinking slump over the toilet bowl, beyond even vomiting. Instead I was awake, alert, drinking more.

And feeling.

He had known she was carrying his child, known that, in killing her, he would also be killing his own flesh and blood, yet that hadn’t been enough to stop him. Not just the taking of a single life, but two.

His son.

Their own daughter.

While he was plunging, had the thought even crossed his mind?

Or was it for their baby he had cried? Head back, mouth wide, a primeval creature processing a single emotion: grief. As if he’d just come across her body unexpectedly, and its expiration had nothing to do with him. Tensed veins were raised hard beneath the underside of his skin, corrugating his neck, his arms, his face, and his vocal cords strained to pierce the silence that had followed in the wake of her screams.

Her screams,
those screams
, I still heard them at night. In dreams where I crouched on the floor beside my bed, face squashed into the centre of the pillow, the sides pressed so hard against my ears it made my wrists hurt; in dreams where my eyes were squeezed shut, jaws clenched hard, my lips pulled tight over my teeth; in dreams where I actually prayed for the screams to continue, because the only thing worse than the sound of her screaming was the silence when she stopped.

That night, in my bedroom, the sudden silence had been louder than what had come before, almost static, raising the hairs on the back of my neck, sending a tingling spray of pins and needles over my skin, which took their energy from the strength vacating my knees.

The silence had been like a vacuum. It drowned out the sounds I made as I rose on weakened legs, drowned out my footsteps, the creak of the bedroom door opening, every normal household noise I should have heard as I crossed the landing – the click of the boiler, the whirr of the fridge, the blare of a lorry horn in the distance – drowned everything out. I heard nothing as I opened their bedroom door, not a peep, just felt a shift of air, like a draft brushing upwards, as my legs finally gave and crumpled into a heap beneath me.

There was hardly any mess at all. The room looked so ordinary; everything on the dressing table was in its place, the bed still neatly made. It bore an impression, so innocent, as if someone had sat there earlier to ease their shoes off, or clip their toenails, maybe rested there briefly before drawing the curtains against the night. The normality of the room created a spotlight effect on the bloody splattered couple at its centre, on the floor.

Berris was on his knees beside her, cradling her head in the crook of his left arm tenderly, as if she were a baby, raising her shoulders from the carpet as he pulled her floppy torso against him. The other arm cuddled her around the waist, supporting her back. As if he had forgotten it was there, his fingers were still closed around the handle of ‘exhibit one’, the knife responsible for blowing away any chance of a lesser manslaughter conviction. The fact that he had taken it from the kitchen drawer, carried it up the stairs and waited for her to come in; ‘The very premeditation of his actions,’ the prosecution said, ‘belie the defence’s claim that this was a crime of passion.’

Her floor-length velvet dress bore a harsh rip just above the hem, where she had trodden on it in her haste to flee.

And tripped.

The heel of her right shoe had snapped, and though I didn’t notice at the time, the coroner would later note that in the fall she’d bruised both knees.

Those bruises were not the cause of death.

She died from four stabs to the back, deep and clean. He bore not a mark, not a single bruise or cut or scratch, because there hadn’t been a struggle. When she should have been fighting for her life, she’d tried instead to run.

He cuddled and cradled her, with his head thrown back, mouth opened wide, emitting a mighty roar that the vacuum swallowed up along with every other sound. Apart from the grotesque horror and absence of music, the whole thing was like a scene from a silent movie.

She let him beat me, and I made him kill her.

Lemon was right. There was no difference between Berris and myself. I had turned into the man I hadn’t even wanted to call ‘Dad’. I almost laughed at the irony of that cold, steely fact, the truth of it. He had lived with us for around four months, that was all, just over one hundred days out of the thousands I had already lived by then, days I had spent with her, loved her, been fulfilled in her company, even while she had one ear fixed fast on the ticking of the clock. Even now, at thirty years of age, I could no more understand that level of desperation than I had then; the crazy logic that any company, even the company of a man like Berris, was worth dying for, the knowledge that she must have been dying for love for years before he came.

A woman like her.

There were as many different types of love as there were people, Lemon was right about that as well. And my love was like Berris’s, to do with ownership and rights, legal-pad-yellow love, camouflaged and cold-blooded and destructive; fine and dandy if you were a single man on the pull for a pretty, rich widow, but I was a mother.

It was, had always been, beyond me.

Throwing back the covers I rose from the bed.

My bladder was full.

I wanted him.

First, I visited the bathroom. Then I went into her room and turned on the light. I opened the cupboard and selected a coat. The floor-length black leather one that flashed a scarlet satin slit. Still inside its dustcover, I placed it gently on the bed. The briefest whisper of settling cellophane, then all was quiet. I went over to her dressing table and sat down on the stool. I pinned my hair back so it was off my face, picked up a powder brush and began.

She had sat here that last night and made herself beautiful. My hatred had been too fresh and consuming for me to watch her, to watch the slow care she took at every stage of the process of transforming herself from merely beautiful to divine. I had seen her when she came back from the hairdresser’s, hurrying to be ready in time, rushing to her room, heard her feet going backwards and forwards between here and the bathroom. I’d been downstairs, acting disinterested, feigning an interest in watching the TV, so I hadn’t been taken through the transformation detail by detail, in small and tiny steps that made the end result less unbearable. Instead, she appeared before me when her metamorphosis was complete and even I, my head fresh with the memory of skin that stung and welts that wept, with my heart full of rage as piercing and murderous as a blade, even I was stunned.

She was beyond beauty.

Literally, she took my breath away.

She who would soon be dead was dressed to kill. She wore a dress, off the shoulder, in black velvet, with a black satin trim that framed the tops of her arms and fell in waves to sweep the floor, and she held it up, raised it from the hip with a finger and thumb, like some southern belle or an aristocrat, someone totally at ease with fashions that needed assistance to make it through the world intact.

I had seen it then.

Her shine.

I thought it was the contrast of the midnight fabric she was draped in like an exquisitely wrapped treat. I thought it was partly because she knew her body so well, knew how to maximize every essence of the beauty she’d been born with, but that night it wasn’t just that, it was more.

She shone.

It seemed her skin shimmered, she truly was glowing, as if for her whole life her beauty had been building up to this moment. The hairdresser had put her hair up at the back and sides, and the top was an explosion of curling gleaming ebony tresses, and a few fell to frame her face, which was fuller,
she
was fuller, with softness and a secret that swelled inside her womb. She had never looked lovelier or more perfect. But Berris was late.

He should have been home by six at the latest. The party was in south London and they were being picked up by friends who would drop them there and bring them back. They had collected Lemon first, and when he arrived at the house, when he saw her, I know now he must have wanted her to himself for a while, to have her on his arm, to be the one introducing her around, knowing other men were watching with envy, thinking she was his. For such was the nature of his love, drooling and waiting, making do with crumbs, stealing a slightly bigger morsel whenever chance provided an opening.

‘You ready?’ he asked.

‘Berris isn’t back yet. I don’t understand it. He should’ve been home long time.’

‘Shit. The people them ah wait outside.’

‘Invite them in, let them have a drink till he comes.’

‘But he need to fresh and dress and everything. I can’t ask them to wait for all that.’

‘Then what should we do?’

He paused a moment, thinking. ‘Come, we go.’

‘And leave Berris?’

‘Berris is a big man. He can make his own way. He know the people them due here at six. He can cab it and catch us up down there.’

‘But he don’t have the address.’

‘I’ll write it down. Jinx, get me piece of paper and a pen.’

A car beeped outside as he wrote.

‘Maybe I should stay,’ my mother said. ‘Wait for him…’

‘Don’t make no sense me leaving you as you’re ready and all,’ Lemon said. He tore the sheet off the pad and handed it to me. ‘Give this to Berris. Tell him I said we’ll see him when he come.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘You sure you gonna be okay on your own?’ my mother asked.

I couldn’t speak to her or meet her eyes. I nodded, looking away.

‘I’ll make it up to you tomorrow,’ she said and she went to kiss me but I turned my face so the kiss missed and flew off into the empty air. She looked at me kind of disappointed, saddened. For a second it was as if she were about to say something, but then she straightened up and the moment passed. ‘Don’t lose it,’ she said as Lemon handed the sheet to me, A4 sized, with hastily scribbled words set out in the centre, like an oversized envelope. The party address.

Don’t lose it.

The last words she said before leaving and they expressed nothing but concern for him.

‘Make sure you put it somewhere safe,’ Lemon said.

‘Okay.’

The sky-blue suede coat was draped over her arm. She handed it to Lemon. He smiled as he opened it wide so she could step inside, slip her hands into the arms and ease it on.

He guided my mother out of the door with a hand placed gently in the small of her back, and a moment later, in a mixed aroma of hairspray and aftershave, musky perfume and animal hide, they were gone.

*

I floated down the stairs. I heard music playing, always music: Gladys Knight and the Pips. At the living-room door I paused and peeped though the crack by the hinges, experiencing a frisson of déjà vu.

He made me come and when I did he’d been thinking of her.

He was sleeping, upright on a chair, sitting side on to the table, chin in palm, the elbow supporting his chin on the table, peaceful as a person who had died while dozing. Silently, I stepped inside.

Able to see all of him now, I noticed that his ankles were crossed, one on top of the other, and the top one tapped out the bass line, dancing. He opened his eyes wide. Abruptly the movement stopped. Hastily he stood and looked me up and down. As if it had been handpicked for this precise moment, ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ began to play. He stepped towards me, took me in his arms and smiled.

And it was as it had always been, that this man, this maestro, could always find the magic words through music, the ones that spoke what I needed to hear that moment, or to say, or to have said to me, and there was no more perfect place to be as the track played on than in his arms, his hands inside the coat, playing with the bare skin of my back, my head resting on his shoulder, his own folded over my neck, inhaling the dizzying scent of my mother’s perfume as it rose from my body.