A Cupboard Full of Coats (9 page)

We were in the girls’ toilets. It stunk of wee and cigarettes and the manky smell that was always in the changing room after we’d finished PE. My hair was frizzed from being plaited straight after being washed. The Electrocuted Look. I hated it when it was like this.

‘I need a hairband, man,’ I said.

‘You’re telling me? One thing I do know, you can’t do Farrah with a bushy Afro.’

She pulled a thick elastic band off her wrist where she always had a stash of them and I took it, pulling my hair back into one, smoothing it down as much as possible.

‘You better put some water on that, Kizzy,’ she said.

I did that, splashed water on it, without looking at her. Sometimes her comments stung, but it wasn’t cool to show it. Kizzy was the daughter of Kunta Kinte, the African slave in
Roots
. Sam pushed her face close to the mirror, examining it.

‘Shit, Jay! Look at this,’ she said, but I blanked her. ‘I think I’m getting a zit. Right on the end of my nose as well. That’s just fuckry, man.’

Sam had a permanent patch of scarlet mounds on her forehead. The spots that came up on her were always red. Her skin was very pale, whiter than most of the white people I knew, and she had hazel eyes that were just beautiful, and thick hair that was a kind of auburn now but, in summer, bleached in the sun so she had blonde highlights at the front and around the edges, and it was kink-free, like her mum’s.

They were a strange bunch, her and her family. They all had the same mum and dad, yet none of them looked alike. Only one of her brothers looked proper half-caste. The middle one was nearly as black as me and the youngest one was as pale as Sam was, but he had red bushy Negro hair. It was like every child in that family had had their parents’ genes put into a Coke bottle, shook up, and then a separate burst of spray had been collected to make each of them. They were as different from each other as a litter of kittens.

‘I’m gonna squeeze it,’ she said, and she did. A few moments later, the site where the teeny pimple had been was ablaze and swollen, as if someone had boxed her.

‘Do you know how you can tell for sure if someone’s done The Nasty?’

I shook my head without looking at her and she was quiet for a second, clocking me.

‘Look, my whole family’s doing my head in. At least you know who you are and where you’re coming from. A whole of something, not frigging
half
of nothing. I swear, I’m never gonna marry any boy who ain’t coming from where I’m coming and put this shit on my kids…’ Her face had gone red, like she was blushing badly. The way she always looked when she was about to cry. The silence was broken by the bell. Break was over. I took one last look at my hair, picked my bag up off the floor, then turned to face her.

‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

She smiled, blinking quickly, relieved. She linked her arm through mine as she hitched her satchel back up on to her shoulder. Though it was only us in the toilets, she glanced around like there might be crowds hiding in the cubicles, earwigging. Her voice was low. She began to explain.

We counted the virgins at lunchtime, not just among the other pupils and the whole of the teachers, but the ones walking around the streets too. We saw an old lady on a Zimmer who was about ninety million years old and still hadn’t done It, and I cracked up so bad I actually wet myself a bit.

It was so simple, I couldn’t believe I had only just found out how to tell. Virgins walked with their toes pointing inwards and those who had done The Nasty, when they walked, their toes pointed out.

On our way into the chip shop at Haggerston Square we passed a group of seven or eight guys from Shoreditch School acting like they thought they were sweet-boys. We queued for ages and took turns drowning our chips with salt and onion vinegar, then carefully tore the bottom off the chip cone so the warm vinegar, instead of ending up dripping out slowly all over our clothes, could just trickle out the one time and done.

The Shoreditch Massive were still loitering a few shops down and, laughing our heads off, we concocted a plan. We came out of the shop and walked past them with our toes pointing so far outwards, we were waddling like a pair of penguins. When we were far enough away to outrun them, Sam turned around and shouted, ‘Renters!’ and we legged it.

I felt heady with knowledge, the power to look at total strangers and know for sure what they’d been up to. I even found myself studying my own feet as I walked, and Sam’s when she wasn’t looking. My feet seemed to naturally point inwards, which made sense. But Sam’s didn’t. Her feet were more or less parallel with each step and I wondered what exactly that meant.

At home time, we discovered netball practice had been cancelled. Sam wanted to go over to Nightingale Estate and mess around in the garages for a while because her mum wasn’t expecting her home for another couple of hours, but I was hungry and couldn’t be bothered.

Unlike me though, Sam didn’t need the company. Once she’d made up her mind about what she wanted to do, that was it. I said I was gonna go home and she decided to go over the garages on her own.

We’d already spent the remainder of our money, what should have been our bus fare home, on rhubarb and custards and pink bon-bons, so we had no choice on the journey home but to trod. Nightingale Estate was just on the other side of the park from the top of my road, so Sam walked with me to my house. We joked about outside for about ten minutes, then she carried on, and I watched her skipping till she disappeared out of sight round the bend at the top of the road.

I let myself in with the key I wore on a shoelace around my neck, having lost the last three keys my mum had given me. Inside, the house was warm and steamy with rice and peas and the smell of curry recently cooked, which was good. I dropped my bags on the floor inside the passage, opened the door to the sitting room and walked in.

My mum was on the settee with a man I’d never seen before. They were kissing so hard that it was a moment before they even realized I was there. I took in a zillion things in a second. His wet red tongue poking into her open mouth. Her blouse undone. His hand inside it. His flies undone. My mum’s hand inside the gaping hole there, moving. Sounds, I think from her, like someone who’d been gagged still trying to speak. And her hair, it looked like she’d been in a fight or something! Of the three of us, I don’t know who was the most shocked.

She leapt up and turned around so her back was to me and I could tell she was buttoning up her blouse. The man kind of leaned forward with his arms crossed over each other on his lap, as if that was supposed to make me believe his flies were done up now.

‘You’re home early!’ my mother said over her shoulder, but it wasn’t a question she was asking, it was an accusation.

‘Netball got cancelled,’ I said.

She turned around. Her shirt wasn’t tucked in properly and she’d left a button undone, just above the waistband of a short black skirt that I’d only ever seen her in once, at the shop, after she’d tried it on. She’d asked me what I thought and we agreed it was too short to wear on the street. She must have gone back without me and bought it. She hadn’t needed to keep it a secret, and the fact that she had, though it was a small thing and silly, made me feel hurt. She smoothed down her hair like that smoothed everything over and said to me, as if it were a perfectly normal occasion and that man had just knocked at the front door, ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Uncle Berris.’

When I looked at him, he was staring down at the floor, but he nodded his head at me in a quick flick, smiling in the foolish way the kids in my class did after they put up their hands to answer a question, got picked, then gave the wrong answer. I looked back at my mother. She was wringing her hands together now and smiling at me in a
whatever you do, don’t make a fuss
kind of way. Looking at her made me feel like I’d shrunk, then I realized I hadn’t, it was her that had grown. I looked down at her feet. She was wearing red clogs with the highest heels I had ever seen her in. And I tried really hard not to notice but it was just blatant that while her heels were neatly together, her toes were definitely pointing out.

*

‘He makes cars, toy ones, for children to play with; makes them out of metal, and he fixes things. He’s really good with his hands…’ – she laughed then at a joke I did not get. ‘He’s just so nice…and so good-looking. Go on, admit it,’ she said, ‘he’s good-looking, ain’t he?’

He was kind of okay for an old guy. He was tall and looked strong. He was dark though, not as dark as me but nowhere near as light as she was, with broad features so sharply shaped it was as if his head had been chiselled out of a smooth piece of dark wood. His hair was skiffled low with a side parting etched on the left-hand side of his scalp, and he had a neat beard that joined his sideburns so that his whole face looked like it was in a black velvet frame. But he was no Superman. And for all his good looks, there was something I didn’t like about him, something in the slant of his eyes and his way of not really looking straight at you, but snatching glances instead, which was what he’d done as he was leaving.

Almost as soon as I thought this, I wondered if I was being fair. The fact was I wasn’t happy, but I did not know if I was unhappy with him. I really couldn’t say what exactly it was that I was unhappy about. All I could think about was what they’d been up to and how many times he’d been here behind my back. And above all of that, I couldn’t stop thinking about the position of her toes. Reluctantly, I nodded.

‘I’m so glad you like him,’ she said, even though I never said that. ‘Jinxy, I think I’m in love. I never thought it would happen again. I never thought anyone would make me feel like this…’ She laughed again, closing her eyes slowly, smiling like she was remembering something wonderful that had nothing to do with me and I wondered if it was to do with what they were doing inside each other’s clothing, her and that man.

‘Why did you say he was my uncle?’ I asked.

She waved away my small and insignificant point. ‘He’s a big man and you’re a child.’

‘I’m not a kid, I’m sixteen. And we’re not related.’

‘I know that, but you should still call him that out of respect.’

‘But I don’t even know him. How can I just start calling him “Uncle”?’

‘You can’t call him “Berris”, like you and him are big alike. I want you to call him “Uncle” for now.’ She laughed. ‘You never know, if things work out maybe one day you’ll call him “Dad”.’ Then came the killer. ‘Jinx, Berris is having some problems where he lives. I told him he could stay here, with us, for a while, till he sorts something out.’

I’d been starving when I came in, famished enough to eat the whole dutchpot of curry on my own. But I’d been playing with my food as she spoke and somehow, even though I’d hardly eaten anything, my appetite was getting less and less the more she spoke.

‘What, live here?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where? In the spare room?’

‘He can sleep in my room,’ she said with yet another laugh. ‘In my bed. With me.’

I put my cutlery down as she rose from her side of the table and walked over to me. She bent down and cuddled me, then kissed me on the head. She was playing me, and I knew it. This was the kind of thing I normally did to her when I wanted money or clothes or for her to grant me a favour of some kind. What kids were supposed to do to parents, not the other way round.

‘Don’t worry, it’s only for a while. You won’t even know he’s here. Okay?’

I was very unhappy about it. Very unhappy indeed. But what could I say? And it wasn’t really like she was asking me because she had already told him he could stay. It was a done deal.

‘Okay.’

She smiled at me and kissed me on the forehead again, smoothed my brows and flicked something from my hair.

‘Good girl. Now eat up.’

There are many different types of rain, and England is famous for all of them. There are showers that start with a light drizzle, then build up to a steady pour. Then there’s rain that begins drip drip, gets heavy, then stops then starts and stops and starts again. Then there’s sudden rain that falls quickly when it’s sunny, like its only ambition is to make a rainbow and once it’s done that, it stops. If I had to describe Berris as rain, he was none of those, and the words ‘You won’t even know he’s here’ turned out to be the understatement of the year.

He moved in within days of my mother telling me and it was like he’d taken over completely, starting with the bathroom. There he spread his man-wares, things alien to our house till then: razors, shaving cream, Pearlwhite toothpaste, Stud, Bay Rum, Brylcream and masses of bottles of aftershave too numerous to count. And he left bits of his jewellery everywhere. There were pieces around the sink, on the edge of the bath, on the cistern at the back of the toilet, the windowsill; Krugerrands and sovereigns on fat rings and heavy belchers, and his collection included some of the chunkiest chaparritas I’d ever seen in my life.

He had a toothbrush that was only a fraction smaller than the toilet brush, as though he needed an industrial cleaner or something to get rid of the gunk growing inside his whopping male gob. Even worse was the toilet seat that either had drips of his wee all over it that you had to wipe off before you could sit down, or was left up, in which case you had to try not to touch the wee on it when you were putting it back down so you could sit.

In the shower he had more lotions and potions than me and my mother put together: bottles of shower gel, Brut and All Spice, and an ‘intimate wash’ for his willy alone which was too gross to even think about. There were scrapers for the heels of his dry feet, tweezers for plucking the Yeti hairs from his nostrils, and a huge scratchy strap type of thing that was apparently the only thing in the universe that cleaned his back properly.

And clothes? There were masses of them. He was the living boutique. I swear he owned about twenty coats in every colour you could dream of and it seemed like every single one had a hat or cap to match it. And shoes? He must have had fifty pairs: leather shoes, suede shoes, patent shoes, lizards, snake skin, crocodile skin,
ostrich
skin for crying out loud, all of which I was forbidden to touch, and cleaning them seemed to be his number-one hobby.